Used batch renaming software to organise music collection, accidentally created hidden files.

[Tim Tucan]

Hi,

I have spent the weekend reorganising my music collection. I preferred all audio files to have a name that start with the track number, so I used batch renaming software and told it to so as such:

%track. %artist – %title

However, some audio files did not have a track number in their metadata, causing their file names to start with a period. For example, instead of having a file named

"03. The Beatles - Maxwell's Silver Hammer.flac"

I get a file named

". The Beatles - Maxwell's Silver Hammer.flac"

This causes the file to be hidden. All batch renaming software I have tried to reverse my little accident do not recognise the hidden audio files, and I have not been able to find another solution.

Does anyone know if there is a way to solve this issue?

 

[Fishrrman]

My solution (probably "doing it the hard way", but I'm like that).

I'd first download the app "Pathfinder". It's shareware, but should run "in demo mode" long enough for you to get done what you need to get done.

Then, I'd set up Pathfinder to make normally-invisible files VISIBLE.

Next, I'd navigate to each album of songs, and manually renumber them in proper order WITHOUT the "period" there.

For example new name:
"03 Maxwell's Silver Hammer.flac"

And then, proceed on to another album of songs, and another -- until the job was done.

Yes, I REALIZE this is probably going to be a LOT of work on your part.

I've been through the same myself, rebuilding an mp3 song collection on a partition that "went bad" on me with no backup (YES, it is now backed up to multiple locations).

Perhaps someone else will offer a better solution.
But if the track numbers are now "all gone", the only solution I see is to re-enter them manually...

Hmmm... you could "go to a backup", and start over from scratch...

 

[Tim Tucan]

Thanks for your response. I kept looking for solutions after creating this thread. Eventually I stumbled on a a renaming application called NameChanger that, unlike many other similar software, is able to process files starting with a period, i.e. hidden files.

It has limited batch capabilities and does not search subfolders, so I still had to manually load every single audio file into the application, but at least it saved me the effort to rename all of them. This saved me a tremendous amount of time and effort in comparison to starting over from scratch.

I felt obliged to share this approach with you and possible other people faced with similar problems in the future.