…because all I had were song titles that were missing the ‘, so for example it said L Amour Toujours instead of L’Amour Toujours, and that is why Google Music wasn’t showing album covers. So I decided to fix it with a service like last.fm.
I tried others too, but the last.fm API had the best C# wrapper, so to start with I gave it about 15 songs out of my more than 2000 in total, to check whether it works well. On that small sample it worked brilliantly.
So I ran it on all of them, and unfortunately that is how I ended up with titles like these (the originals were always Artist-Title:
- Tata Bojs-TATA BOJS Filmarska (…)
- Tom Jones And Mousse T.-Sexbomb – Swing – That Swing is probably the music genre, good thing it rarely added this
- KJ-52 Fanmail – Because a file name can contain only 1 hyphen and it put it into the artist, suddenly I don’t have the song Fanfail but 52 Fanmail…
- Zecchino D’Oro-Il Trenino Dello Zecchino – The original title was Gigi D’Agostino – Trenino .. since they didn’t have such a song in their DB (it was never released anywhere), it replaced it with a different song that also had trenino in its title (by the way, “Trenino” is Italian and means “Little Train” – I only found that out just now, but I have loved that song for as long as I can remember).
And because I had about 400 songs like that, this is the most common case. The problem is that even I don’t know the titles of those Gigi songs, so a lot of them will end up as Inedito x. - [unknown]-1709 Bach Toccata In D Minor – Here I don’t know the original title, but I don’t like that [unknown] there.
- Midi Lidi are the band that got hit the hardest. Only occasionally did it leave things as they were: Midi Lidi-Muzika Paka 2007, sometimes it converted everything to uppercase MIDI LIDI-ZAHRADA, and sometimes it replaced spaces with underscores/hyphens: MIDI_LIDI-Co_jsem_mel_dnes_k_obedu Co_ja_vsechno_uvedu . I assume this is not the official title as it appears on the release.
- Florence + The Machine-You’ve Got The Love – here I am carefully replacing “+” with “and”, and it reverts everything back to “normal” in one go..
- And I could go on like this. I can’t say whether that automatic renaming brought me more benefit than frustration. In any case it was a good lesson, so that next time I avoid it. But right now it doesn’t matter anyway, I have to fix it and never do it this way again.
Or yes, do it, but prepare the program for the special cases I have listed here. And the main thing is that the reason I ran it in the first place wasn’t fixed where I needed it, so I was still left with, for example, Gigi D Agostino-L Amour Toujours [A Cappella] (here it didn’t find the song in the DB, so it skipped it. If only it had done that with all of them.)