Organize songs by Original Release Year using a new SongKong Rename mask

I received the following request on the forum today:

I am looking to take my entire collection and using SongKong fix, get rid of dups, and then finally end up with all songs characterized like this:

[Songname][Artist][original release year]

and have each song go into a separate subdirectory that is the year

So I would have subdirectories that would look like this:

1960
1961
1962
etc.

and in each subdirectory would be all songs that were released that year.

Is this doable? If so, how?

If not, how close can I get before having to do manual work?

Thanks.

Creating new mask is a common request so it is worth going through the steps

Activate File renaming

By default files are not renamed, so if you want this on the Basic tab you need to set Rename Files based on Metadata to something not leave it as No. I would usually suggest setting it to Yes if matched to a release but since the customer is not interested in releases only songs a better setting would be Yes if matched to a release or a song. You can find more about this option in this article

Create a new mask

Then go to Filenaming tab. Although SongKong comes with a number of predefined mask we do not have this particular one so select Add to add a new mask

Now give the mask a Name that will help you recognize it

Original Year/Title - Artist - Original Year

and then enter the Mask itself

ifnotempty2(substring(originalyear,4),'unknownyear','/')
+ ifnotempty(title, ' - ')
+ ifnotempty(artist, ' - ')
+ substring(originalyear,4)



Then tab out of the mask and you can see an example mask is now displayed showing how files would look using this mask. 

The substring function shortens a value but also allows for when the value is shorter than the length you want to shorten it to.

The ifnotempty function lets you specify a value and a separator value, it only outputs anything if the value is not empty.

Since some songs may not have an original year we provide an alternative of unknownyear and make use of the ifempty2 function, this provides a second value to use if the first value is empty.

Click OK to create the mask

Use the Mask

Now we need to actually use the mask, in this case we want to use the same mask for all our songs so we need to select it for both the Rename Mask and the Compilation Rename Mask

Run Fix Songs

Select Start to fix your songs, and as the report shows the files are now organized by original year with an unknownyear folder for when the year is not known.

SongKong rename masks have full access to your songs metadata, and it makes use of the Javascript Expression language so there is no limit on how complex you require your rename mask to be.