Ignoring 'The' in the sort name...

[politby 88]

Anyone know of a tool that can process all my movies' XML files and clear the sort titles? Mine are all messed up...

 

thanks

[ebr 16171]

LOL.  Yeah, I'm sure it is open for interpretation but I guess I'd accept a Librarian's view of what is technically correct.  

[ebr 16171]

Anyone know of a tool that can process all my movies' XML files and clear the sort titles? Mine are all messed up...

 

thanks

 

You could delete them all and let MB re-create them. 

[politby 88]

You could delete them all and let MB re-create them. 

I know, but that opens up to the risk of incorrect matches...

 

I tried xmltagtweaker but it won't run on my Windows 8.1 machine.

[politby 88]

Yes, the best thing to do is just delete the sort title and let MB create it.  Unless you have something like "The Dark Knight" that you want to sort as "Batman 4" or something.

 

Does not look like this is working. I deleted the <sort title> tag from all the offending movie.xml files. Refreshing the metadata in MB3 just recreates the old title (starting with "The") - it does not read the changed xml. Why is that?

 

If I use the metadata manager to empty the "Sort name" field, save, and then refresh, MB changes the title to one without the "The". 

[Luke 42077]

because the xml file is just an output. what you did in step 2 is the right way.

[politby 88]

Okay. What I ended up doing, and it worked, was to delete the library .db files and set up the library from scratch.

 

So tell me if I understand this correctly: the first time a library is created (or when new items are found), MB Server will read existing metadata and images from the media folders and populate its database. Beyond that point, anything written (assuming "save locally" is enabled) to the media folders by MBS is just for the benefit of other applications and will never be read again. Correct?

 

 

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

 

[Luke 42077]

well if you change the xml we will read the changes, but yes it's just an output. you shouldn't delete your library db though

[politby 88]

So you got a successful resilience test there. The files were re-created and there are no side effects.

But if you are saying it reads the xml files, should it not have re-created new sort titles in the library after finding them missing?

 

I used TextCrawler to remove the tag from all 1,900 movie.xml files.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

Edited December 20, 2013 by politby

[Luke 42077]

no. SortTitle only goes in xml if you want a custom value. default behavior is that it's kept blank and created on the fly

[griffen247 5]

I've only skimmed over this topic, but...... I'm a big user of MCM and I've often found any metadata problem can be solved usually by exporting (simply moving the folder out of your collection) to another location & then doing a couple of passes with the 'Shift + F5' cache clearing task.  I've even resorted to taking the folder with the problem metadata and running it thru MCM on a spare PC, and re-fetching the metadata, saving it and then importing it back to your library.

 

I don't know why, but it just seems to work.  I currently have the movie A.C.O.D being displayed A.C.O.D (ACOD (2013)) ...... I've spent about 2 hours trying to find where it is pulling this from and just can't figure it so about to give up and just delete the damn thing - wasn't a very good film anyway!!

 

This thread does raise the question though about the future of MCM supporting MB3, which I hope continues as it's a very good app, and sorry guys MB3 just isn't quite there enough yet for me.  I've spent a long time getting 9TB of media correctly displaying metadata, so just want to wait for MB3 to be rock solid.

 

Good luck

[Koleckai Silvestri 1154]

I've given up on MCM except for a few of the bulk rename features.

[zedox 1]

Late reply but will prove useful for anyone searching for a solution on batch/mass updating sort titles.

 

How-to batch remove sort-title tags from metadata (Windows):

1. Download and install Notepad ++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/)
2. In Windows Explorer navigate to your movies folder and search 'movie.xml'
3. Select all the 'movie.xml' files then right click and select Edit with NotePad++
4. In NotePad++ Click 'Search' and then 'Replace'
5. Under 'Find what' type <SortTitle>(.*?)</SortTitle>
6. Under 'Replace with' type <SortTitle></SortTitle>
7. Under 'Search mode' click the 'Regular expression' radio button
8. Click 'Replace All in All Opened Documents'
9. Click 'Close'
10. Click 'File' and then 'Save All'
11. Close Notepad++
12. You're done!

[Deathsquirrel 745]

That may be a function of your metadata preferences.  My copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly has the same sort title as all my movies by default, which is none.  I refreshed the data to mae sure I hadn't deleted a bad string. 

 

I have themoviedb as my preferred data source and do all metadata file creation in MB3.