Speaking of ‘way off topic’, perhaps someone could direct me to a forum more applicable to what I am trying to accomplish, if I am way off the subjects discussed about MetaBrainz.It offers renaming files based on the tag information, replacing characters or words in tags and filenames, importing tag information, and adjusting the size and image format of embedded cover art. Way off topic, but if anyone is interested, I move the songs for a show to DropBox, and import them to the OnSong app on my iPad. My system works well, as long as iTunes keeps it’s filthy paws off my data:-) (show 13, 10 indicates accompaniment, 03 is the position of the song in the list. It is essential for me to keep all files listed in my own filing system for songs when I perform my shows. I also use Swinsian and auto copy all from iTunes, but Swinsian sometimes cannot find all my songs. In iTunes, despite having Keep and Copy (iTunes Prefs/Adv) clicked, I am not losing files or having them changed by iTunes since I stopped storing any of my songs in iCloud, and unsubscribed from iTunes Match.

Search/Replace Tag Text (from Doug Adams) seems to work just fine for me so far. You might want to look into Mp3Tag on Wine, Puddletag if you can get it installed (for anyone using Linux, it’s an amazing re-implementation), or something else in that vein. Really, though, Picard (and, to a lesser extent, MusicBrainz as a whole) is about adding a broad variety of high-quality data about a particular track, and using it to simply change a single field is actually harder than it would be in most other programs. If you haven’t yet matched them, avoid clicking “Scan” and “Lookup” for the same reason. If the files are already matched to releases in the database, then you may want to drag them back to the left pane to avoid unexpected edits of the rest of the data. Whichever one you want, add the line to a new script in the proper page of the options, import the songs you want to change (100 should be all right, but if it goes slowly, do it in smaller chunks), and then save them. That will change every instance, though, so if for whatever reason you have that text later in the title, it would be better to explicitly specify the start of the string (note the second r in the function name, and the ^ in the search string): $set(title,$rreplace(%title%,^shw15etc,shw16etc)) The simplest form of changing the field would be: $set(title,$replace(%title%,shw15etc,shw16etc))

Given you mentioned iTunes, I assume you’re looking at the song title rather than the file name? Otherwise, I’d recommend searching for “Mac batch rename” – you could technically do that with Picard as well, but it’s even more of a hack, especially when there’s almost certainly plenty of programs designed for that (at a brief look, this seems to do it well enough). That’s not really what Picard is optimized for, but you might be able to (mis)use it for that.

Swinsian musicbrainz