
This is an excerpt from the main AMPlay documentation.

* 3.4.5 Naming:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This pane has three sections;


Naming Method;
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This allows you to change the method used to determine naming
information for the tracks included in the current selection.

AMPlay can obtain naming information either by extracting it from the
pathname of the file, or by reading the ID3 tag (if any) on each file.

Clicking change will apply your choice.

Note that reading the ID3 tags of large numbers of files can be time
consuming, particularly if they are on slow filing systems.

Also note that if you have manually editted the naming details of any
tracks in the selection, this information will be lost - when the
change is applied, all tracks will end up with either the contents of
the tag, or the default pathname derived name.

This section also indicates the current naming scheme in use. This will
indicate whether the tracks in the current selection use tag-based,
pathname-based, or some of each. It also indicates whether any manual
edits have taken place since, with an extra warning that editted
information will be lost if you reset the naming method of an editted
track.

Notes;

- If you tell AMPlay to use tag based naming for a given track, but the
  track does not actually have a tag, it will remain set to pathname
  based naming.


Edit Names
~~~~~~~~~~

This allows you to edit the naming details of the selected range of
tracks.

If you have selected a track, then all fields are edittable.

If you have selected an album, then the track name and track number
fields are greyed out. The album and artist names are edittable. The
other fields will be greyed out or not depending on whether they vary
within the album. e.g. If all the tracks in the album have the same
year attribute, then the year will be edittable. If there is a mixture
of years, the year field will grey itself out.

If you have selected an artist, then much the same applies as for
albums, except that the album field is also greyed out.

Editting is not available if the entire database is selected.

For the Comment, Genre, and Year fields, if they vary within the
selection, they will grey out, but there is a tick box next to them
called 'Edit' that allows you to force them into the edittable state.
This allows you to, e.g. impose a consistent year on all the tracks in
an album.

There are two buttons below all this - Original and Apply Edit.

Apply Edit takes whatever changes you've made in the edittable fields,
and applies them to each track in the selection. Any fields which are
not edittable (i.e. are greyed out) are left intact with their existing
value. i.e. You can edit the album name of all the tracks in the album,
without affecting any other naming information about each track.

If you have started making changes to the fields, and wish to go back
to the current settings, click Original. Note that Original does not
undo the effects of Apply.

Notes;

- The various text conversion options apply to naming information,
  whether it came from a pathname or not. Therefore, even if it came
  from a tag, if you have lanman conversions enabled, the string ';+'
  will be shown as '&', and so on for the other conversion options.

- See also the FAQ on track numbering (section 6.21).


Tag Actions
~~~~~~~~~~~

Re-Read tags is useful in the case where you used tag based naming with
AMPlay, and have since updated the tags on the files themselves, using
some other tool. Normally, AMPlay reads the tag once, and caches the
contents so that it does not have to touch the file again in normal
use except when actually playing it.

This button tells AMPlay that, for the tracks in the selection, it
should re-read the tag information and update its cached copy.

There is an option to preserve editted information - i.e. if the cached
copy of the tag has been manually editted, don't overwrite it with the
tag from the file. This can be useful for cases where the naming
information doesn't fit into the limited length strings of the tag.

Re-read tags is greyed out if there are no tracks in the current
selection whose naming information came from a tag. (i.e. they all use
pathname based naming of some form.)


Write tags allows you to write the naming information that AMPlay has
back into the ID tag on the file. There are two options here;

- Overwrite existing tag.
- Write pathname information to tag.

Neither is selected by default, but you must select at least one of
them for the Write Tags button to do much.

The reason for this is that unless you have 'write pathname...'
selected, it will only write the tag of tracks that use tag based
naming. All such tracks already have a tag, so unless you have
'overwrite existing tag' selected AMPlay will leave the existing tag
alone.

Notes;

- Selecting write pathname information to tag, with overwrite tag
  unticked will result in adding a tag to all the tracks that don't
  currently have one.

- Writing a tag can take as long, or longer, than reading the tag. If
  there are a large number of tracks in the selection, and tags really
  are being written (i.e. it's overwriting, or most of the tracks
  aren't already tagged), then it can take a long while.

- AMPlay writes tag format 1.1, including the track number within
  album. Both 1.0 and 1.1 formats are readable (AMPlay uses the
  AMPlayer module for reading tags). v2.0 format tagging is not
  supported in any form.

- Files must be writeable by the user for write tags to work.

- There is currently no option to rename files according to their
  AMPlay name (e.g. to edit a pathname based name and then update the
  actual pathname with the editted version).

________________________________________________________________________
Copyright  2008 Mike Sandells, mike@mikejs.com
Last Modified: 30.05.2008