mp3rename: The ubiquitous function, in its simplest form

Before I even showed you a screenshot, you would probably have an idea of what mp3rename does.

And yet I’d be leaving out a few crucial points if I said no more than that.

First, mp3rename needs you to set the “look” of the files when they’re renamed. In other words, it wants to know how the files should look when they’re done.

So running it the first time with something like this

mp3rename -s '&a - &b - &k. &t'

and then following it with

mp3rename *mp3

Should give you files that look like

Revolution Void - Increase the Dosage - 1. Invisible Walls.mp3

and that would be good enough.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to reverse the action, i.e., to fill tags based on file names. For that, you’ll need another tool.

You’ll need to ask for zero-padding, if you want it. And be careful with the -v flag for verbosity; somehow, when I used that once, all the files were written to a single one called -v.mp3. That caused some problems.

That’s about it though. I can vouch for a lot of other renaming tools for audio files, but I suppose in its simplest form, this is what the function looks like.

Oh, by the way: There are a lot of projects that go by the name “mp3rename”. This one comes out of the Debian repos and appears in AUR; the fact that it was in both is the reason I used it. There’s another one here, and some others elsewhere.