Question

I often find myself in a situation where I have a folder containing files which are named according to a certain file naming convention, and I have to go through them manually to rename them to the one I want. A laborious repetitive task.

E.g. 01_artist_name_-_album_title_-_song_title_somethingelse.mp3 -> Song_Title.mp3

So the removal of certain bits of information, replacement of underscores with spaces, and capitalisation. Not just for music, that’s just an example.

I have been thinking about automating this task using Python. Basically I want to be able to input the starting convention and my wanted convention and for it to rename them all accordingly.

Ideally I want to be able to do this in Python on Windows, but I have an Ubuntu machine I could use for this if it was easier to do in bash (or Python on UNIX).

If anyone can shed light on how I might approach this problem (suggestion of IO python commands that read contents of a folder – and rename files – on Windows, and how I might go about stripping the information from the filename and categorising it, maybe using RegEx?) I’ll see what I can make it do and update with progress.

Answer 1

For your special case:

import  glob, shutil, os.path

# glob.glob returns a list with all pathes according to the given pattern 
for path in glob.glob("music_folder/*.mp3"):

     # os.path.dirname gives the directory name, here it is "music_folder"
     dirname = os.path.dirname(path)

     # example: 01_artist_name_-_album_title_-_song_title_somethingelse.mp3
     # split returns "_song_title_somethingelse.mp3"
     interesting = path.split("-")[2]

     # titlepart is a list with ["song", "title"], the beginning "_" and the
     # 'somehting' string is removed by choosing the slice 1:-1
     titlepart = interesting.split("_")[1:-1]

     # capitalize converts song -> Song, title -> title
     # join gluest both to "Song_Title"
     new_name = "_".join(p.capitalize() for p in titlepart)+".mp3"

     # shutil.move renames the given file
     shutil.move(path, os.path.join(dirname, new_name))

If you want to use regular expression, you have to replace:

     m=re.search(".*-_(\S+_\S+)_.*",path)
     if m is None:
        raise Exception("file name does not match regular expression")
     song_name = m.groups()[0]
     titlepart = song_name.split("_")