Mageia forum

I would like to find all .mp3 files with no album and set the album to "(unknown album)".

I have tried this:

kid3-cli -c "filter '%{album} equals \"\" and %f contains mp3'" -c "set album '(unknown album)'"

This sort of works but has some problems:

• Although it filters out the non-mp3 files, it seems not to do short circuit evaluation. For instance, I have a zero length (bad) .mp4 file. When it reaches this file it gives me a ReadChildAtoms error. Apparently it tries to check the album (failing to do so on the zero length file) before it checks to see if the name contains .mp3 (and changing the order doesn't work either).
• It doesn't limit itself to the current directory.

How can I fix these problems?

How do you pass the filenames or the directory to kid3-cli in your example ?

I'd suggest to run find beforehand to remove empty files or move them away, as that's not really a task for kid3-cli.
But you should probably create a bugreport against kid3-cli for your issue with the empty file.

In general I'd say that's more of a question for kid3, see e.g. https://sourceforge.net/p/kid3/discussion/ or https://forum.kde.org

I'm not passing any filenames in. I want this to operate on all .mp3 files in the current directory.

In fact, I originally tried a version that is inside a for loop and passed a filename in, but I couldn't figure out the correct syntax to pass in a single filename and still filter on it (since I need to filter it out if it doesn't have a blank album).

Also, trying to post on Sourceforge gives me "You do not have permission to post in any forums."

I'll try forum.kde.org.

From the examples in the man page or the handbook, you would at least need to pass the starting directory to kid3-cli.
And you can filter based on the filename, but I'm not sure how to exclude subdirectories that way.

FWIW, apparently you can also ask here: https://kid3.kde.org/#support