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[sherekhan]

I have downloaded some module collections where the collectors have renamed the files, adding style, descriptions, years etc. I would like to remove these, and rename the files to their original names or something similar. Preferably by using the metadata of the file (title, format) and rename them en masse. Does such a tool exist?

[Saga Musix]

Personally I'm not aware of specific tools for that but depending on the data you have available it might be very simple to do. However, I think just renaming files based on their title might not be the best move - lots of titles are abbreviated or left empty altogether. Sometimes people also just put "(c) author name" there. What would you do with modules that have no title set? Or formats that have no clear indication of what their title is? I think this is an important answer to question before you even think about the technical aspect of the task.

[Axxy]

Afaik, there is no magical rename tool that I've seen as yet unfortunately, especially something that uses the metadata from the mods themselves, because a sizeable chunk of them have no internal metadata at all or totally unknown.

I decided years ago to rename the mods, ie. author_modname.extension, here on MA they use something similar. I only chose it this way to make it easier for me to structure the mods, so I could keep an Excel list of everything as a database and store the mods on my system.

I use TotalCommander for most stuff, it does have a multi-rename tool function that can make renaming the file name easier and batch rename too, there are probably other utils that do the same thing out there.

I seem to remember a mod renamer program on Modland. There are some utilities in the pub/software/utilities/dos or windows folders. I think it renames to the internal title of the mod and also batch rename all files (that it supports), but it won't rename by author etc.

You could also try Saga' Mod Library from his website, doesn't rename files or anything but does generate a good database of your mod collection.

[sherekhan]

The answer was right in front of me the whole time. I use foobar2000 with openMPT plugin a lot of the time for playing mods, and that program has a nice rename feature that allows you to rename media files based on metadata. This also works for mods. There's not much metadata there for advanced naming of course, but I only wanted the title, and that works fine.

You can easily see both filenames and titles, so in the case of weird titles it is easy to only select files with valid titles, and then rename those.

I prefer fileanmes to be clean, and use folders to group files by author, style etc.