advanced ID3 tagging?

[Lt Major Burns]

i have about a thousand tracks in my itunes which aren't part of any larger album, but still have album tags. as they're not part of a full album, it's starting to get messy, so i'd like to rename the album to something like 'other'. however, i'd still like to keep the information that's already there.

ideally i'd like to move all the information from the 'album' tag to the 'comment' section instead.

is there any mac tagging software that will allow me to do this?

 

[Mikuro]

The great thing about iTunes is that it's scriptable. You can manipulate tags any way you want with the help of AppleScript. I wrote myself a script to do exactly what you need a while ago. Here it is:

tell application "iTunes"
	repeat with tracknum from 1 to the number of items of the selection
		set the_tag to the album of item tracknum of the selection
		set the_comment to the comment of item tracknum of the selection
		if the_comment does not contain the_tag then set the comment of item tracknum of the selection to (the_comment & the_tag)
	end repeat
end tell

Just select all the tracks you want to change in iTunes, and run the script. If any of those tracks already have comments, the album name will be appended to the existing comment, so you won't lose any data.

I've also zipped it up and attached it here for convenience. I recommend putting it in ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts, so that it will be easily accessible from iTunes's own AppleScript menu.

 

[Lt Major Burns]

trust you to come up with a script, eh? cheers mikuro, your script knowledge is amazing, yet again....