Hi:
I name my ebook files in this manner: author last name, author first name - book title. (For example: Nettina, Sandra - Lippincott Manual of Nursing.) When I "scan" my ebook files, Alfa does not retrieve the "author" and "title" information from the filenames. How can I get the program to do this? Thank you.
How to turn filename into author title metadata
Submitted by zaphod on 10 July 2010 - 10:35pm.
Hi, AEM can only save filename as a book title, but it can't retrieve author name from the file name. I don't think that it's possible, because there is no standard filename template that can be parsed.
You may opt to retrieve title and author from the ebook metadata (FB2, LRF, EPUB are supported) or retrieve ISBNs and then update books from the web
This could be partially corrected if the program included several parsing expressions which you can choose to use for the filenames, say a dropdown box in settings:
Scan filenames for metadata in the format:
1- lastname, firstname - Title
2- firstname, lastname - Title
3- Title - Firstname, lastname
4 - Title - lastname, firstname - Publisher
And so on. Obviously you won't cover 100% of possible variations but I am pretty sure 99% of the people are there use just 4 or 5 different schemes
Yes, but what if a book title contains dash "-" or coma ","?
And what if another separator (not "-") is used in the file title?
This is basically a regexp issue, some programas (like ACDSee) allow you to "build" the expression they are going to use to rename files. In that case the people who has a consistent naming in their books could tell the program how to interpretate the filenames:
Scan filenames for metadata in the format: ... where the program offers you placeholders such as:
5-
{af} firstname
{al} lastname
{t} title
{p} publisher
The Great-Great American Dream . Robert_Rubin . Oxford Press could be described to the program as:
{t}.{af}_{al}.{p}
Normally the "." has a special meaning in regular expressions but this is just an example, OTOH
The Great-Great American Dream - Robert_Rubin - Oxford Press
Could be tricky unless the user can create a full regexp expressions but probably it's easier for him to either:
a) Change the offending character that will spoil the filename parsing
b) Manually correct the files (low %) that the scan pick up with wrong details. Better 80% than 0%
Even a not very powerful implementation of filenames templates could be very handy since most people won't have metadata or ISBN for a large number of books.