PowerGREP is designed to search through text documents. It can search through audio files or music files by creating a plain text conversion of the meta data inside these files. This includes all the information usually displayed by music players, like the title of the song and the name of the artist.
To be able to search through the meta data in audio files, you need to set the “file formats to convert to plain text” on the File Selector panel to a configuration that converts audio files to plain text. In the configuration, the option “Use PowerGREP’s built-in decoder to convert files to plain text” should be turned on for the file formats “audio file meta tags (ID3, APE, FLAC, Vorbis, MP4, WAV)” and “Windows Media Audio (WMA) meta tags”. All default configurations do this, except for “(unused)”, “none”, and “compound documents”.
This file selection is available in the PowerGREP5.pgl library as “Media: Search and edit audio file meta data”.
With a proper configuration selected on the File Selector panel, you can use the Editor|Open menu item to open an audio file and view it in PowerGREP’s built-in editor. The text you see in the editor is the text that PowerGREP would search through when the file is included in an action. You will see one line of text for each meta tag. It consists of the the name of the tag or a label for the tag indented with spaces, a colon and a space, followed by the contents of the tag. Tags that PowerGREP recognizes are indicated with a label in mixed case. PowerGREP uses the same label across all tag formats. Tags that PowerGREP does not recognized are indicated with the tag’s name in all caps.
Title: Water Prelude (feat. Angel City Chorale)
Artist: Christopher Tin
Genre: Classical
Album: The Drop That Contained the Sea
Track: 1/10
Year: 2014
Album Artist: Christopher Tin
Composer: Christopher Tin
Tag Types: FLAC
ENCODER: xACT 2.26
PowerGREP uses the following labels for tags that it recognizes: Title, Artist, Genre, Album, Track, Disc, Year, Album Artist, Composer, Publisher, Rating, Tag Types, Comment, and Lyrics. The labels always appear in the same order. Labels may be omitted for files that don’t have a complete set of tags. Labels may be duplicated for files that have duplicate tags with different values. The Title, Artist, and Tag Types labels are always present. For audio files that have no meta data at all their values will be completely blank.
You can freely edit the values of the tags in PowerGREP’s editor. PowerGREP will update the meta data in the audio file when you save it. You can also modify the tag values in a search-and-replace action.
You can add new tags by adding a new line to the file with a label that PowerGREP recognizes followed by a colon, space, and the value you want for the tag. You don’t need to indent the label to make the values line up. Supported tag types are APEv2, FLAC, ID3v1, ID3v2, MP4, Vorbis, WAV, and WMA. The Comment and Lyrics labels allow multiple lines of text. The others only allow a single line.