Get tags from filenames

Turn reliable names into saved track, title, artist and album fields. In about 15 minutes you will read two filenames, add their parent-folder information, and learn to recognize a pattern that matches but captures the wrong meaning. The names themselves will stay unchanged.

• Two copied, writable whole-track audio files; keep the originals elsewhere.
• A practice layout like the one below, with no unsaved OpenTag edits.
• Familiarity with selecting files and opening Extended tags….

Music/Juniper Vale/Harbour Lights (2024)/01 - Paper Boats.mp3
Music/Juniper Vale/Harbour Lights (2024)/02 - Lanterns on the Water.mp3

Use copies already named that way, or name your practice copies in your file manager before opening them. Do not change an audio extension to pretend a different format. This lesson writes tags from your names; it does not verify their musical accuracy.

1. Inspect names and tags separately

Open the copied album through File → Change directory…. Select the first file and open Extended tags…. Compare its TITLE and TRACK with 01 - Paper Boats.mp3 in the file list. A good filename and an empty title can coexist because they are stored in different places.

Close Extended tags without changing anything. Select both practice files. Save or discard any pending edits before using a converter. Its Apply step writes immediately, unlike ordinary tag-panel edits that wait for Save.

2. Draw a pattern of the filename

Choose Convert → Filename → Tag… and put this in Filename pattern:

%track% - %title%

Read it as “capture a track, then find a space, hyphen and space, then capture the title.” Here %track% names a destination field. It does not read an existing track value. The extension is omitted automatically.

Choose Preview. You should see these captures:

Filename	TRACK	TITLE
01 - Paper Boats.mp3	01	Paper Boats
02 - Lanterns on the Water.mp3	02	Lanterns on the Water

Inspect both rows. A preview is the place to discover a wrong separator or an unexpected title, before applying it to audio files.

3. Apply and verify the first conversion

Choose Apply to 2 files. The captured fields are saved now. Open each file's Extended tags and check TRACK and TITLE; other fields, such as an existing comment, are retained. The audio filenames remain unchanged.

There is no extra Save tags step for these completed converter writes. Read operation errors before assuming both files succeeded. Session Edit → Undo can reverse recorded changes; keep the original files for recovery beyond that session.

4. Read the artist and album folders too

Select the same two files, reopen Filename → Tag…, and use:

%artist%\%album% (%year%)\%track% - %title%

Use literal backslashes in the pattern on macOS and Linux too. They divide the folder levels. This relative pattern takes the last two folders plus the filename, so the earlier Music folder is irrelevant.

Preview again. Both files should gain ARTIST = Juniper Vale, ALBUM = Harbour Lights and YEAR = 2024, while keeping their respective titles and tracks. The literal ( and ) separate the year from the album. Apply only when those captures match your actual layout, then inspect the saved fields. Those captured fields replace any previous values there.

5. Learn what a successful match cannot tell you

Captures take the shortest text that allows the rest of the pattern to match. That is a matching rule; it does not understand album names. With the folder pattern above:

Album folder	Captured ALBUM	Captured YEAR
Harbour Lights (2024)	Harbour Lights	2024
Harbour Lights (Deluxe) (2024)	Harbour Lights	Deluxe) (2024

The second row matches syntactically, but its year is wrong. Cancel that preview and handle that naming convention separately. One explicit pattern for it is:

%artist%\%album% (Deluxe) (%year%)\%track% - %title%

This deliberately omits the literal (Deluxe) from ALBUM. If you want it in the stored album name, choose a different explicit extraction and cleanup policy instead. A separator repeated inside an artist or title deserves the same careful preview.

For a filename 03 - North Pier - archive.mp3, unwanted suffix text can be consumed with %dummy%:

%track% - %title% - %dummy%

That produces track 03 and title North Pier, without a DUMMY field. It does not know whether archive is disposable; that is your decision. Adjacent captures such as %artist%%title% are refused because there is no separator defining where one value ends.

6. Distinguish a mismatch from a bad capture

A file named 01. Paper Boats.mp3 does not fit %track% - %title%. Preview marks it No match, not changed. Check these rows rather than assuming every selected file was retagged. Change the pattern to fit a separate selection; do not remove meaningful punctuation from every file to force one pattern to work.

A matched row can still be semantically wrong, as the Deluxe example shows. Check captured text and actual destination fields, not only the number on the Apply button. Patterns are neither regular expressions nor a place to put $upper(...); clean captured values as a separate step.

7. Undo deliberately

Open Edit and read the Undo operation label. Undo the latest folder extraction and inspect the artist/album fields; another undo can reverse the earlier track/title conversion. Work backward through actual recorded operations rather than assuming one undo reverses every step of a lesson. Your copied filenames have stayed the same throughout.

What you learned

• Filenames and tags are independent; a converter can connect them deliberately.
• A capture pattern names destinations and matches literal separators.
• Relative folder patterns read trailing path levels; %dummy% discards a part.
• A nonmatch stays unchanged, while a successful match still needs a meaning check.
• Applying a converter saves immediately, and undo follows recorded operations.

Next steps

• Tags from folder and file names: disc folders, repeated artist captures and other layouts.
• Filename → Tag reference: exact extension and matching rules.
• Guess Values: use %title% as a source format string and %artist% / %title% as the guessing pattern when Juniper Vale / Paper Boats is already in a tag, rather than in a filename. The source is read before those destination fields are replaced; applying that action also writes immediately.
• Clean up a messy library: tidy known metadata after checking the extraction.