Batch delete & move text around - Kim Jensen?

Hello new boy here.

I've had a bit of a search on the forum but I've not been able to recognise what I'm looking for. I bet it's there but I can't see it. Hopefully it's something Kim Jensen would know about.

Basically I need to batch delete numbers and move some text around in Windows files.

I'm ripping CDs to flac files that I can see in the CD folders using Windows Explorer with a standard Windows 7 laptop. At the moment I don't want to do anything with the music or any tags that are referred to at point 7. below.

Ordinarily the music tracks can stay in their CD/album format but when it comes to Singles that just happen to be on random compilation CDs, that won't work. There are many with 4 or 5 instances of the same track but pre-selecting the wanted tracks and ripping only those would be far too mind-blowing.

So, getting all the tracks together into alphabetical order (ideally by song title) would make it easier for me to identify the unwanted tracks and delete them. But, as you'd expect, the track file names show the track numbers e.g. 05_Buddy_Holly_-_That'll_Be_The_Day.flac.

The least I need to do is batch delete ALL the number prefixes like 05_ or 5, up to about 25/30 per CD but what would be even better would be to invert the file names so they show the song title first e.g. That'll_Be_The_Day_-_Buddy_Holly.flac, (I've placed '_-_' between artist and song but that's not essential).

As far as I understand it, none of these changes affect how the music is viewed on the player.

Here's how I see it being worked:
1. Rip the umpteen CDs in full with the tracks all auto-identified like the example above.

2. Move all the resulting music files from their 'CD' folder to a single Windows folder.

3. Remove the track number pre-fixes (01_, 02_ or 1, 2 etc.) and if possible change the file names so they appear at the beginning.

4. Use Windows Sort so that the tracks fall into alphabetical order by artist or better still by song title.

5. Delete all repeats (except other artist's versions).

6. Select the remaining flac files and place these in folders called: Singles A to F, Singles G to L, etc. with about 25 tracks on each (or one giant 'album' with all the singles on it).

7. Use something to name/tag the final collection/s so they are identified with their new 'albums' (using dBpoweramp or mp3tag?) rather than their original CDs and number-tag them in their new play-order. The players will still 'see' the artist and hopefully the tracks will be searchable.

8. Move the results back to the music store.

Sorry this is such long post but I have tried to make it so I'm not wasting your time with half a story. Even so I bet I've forgotten something obvious. I really hope you can help with steps 3 and 4 and if there's a genius out there who knows about the other stuff, that would be great.

Do you think Advanced Renamer can help with this, and if yes, what steps should I take?

Thanks,
Dave

---

Are there any warnings about pasting in apostrophes? SORRY if any punctuation errors slip through.

---

Reply to #1:
To remove the numbers you can use the Remove Pattern method configured like this:
Pattern: ^\d+_
Use regular expressions: Checked
Apply to: Name

For all the other tasks you will need to use Windows Explorer and not Advanced Renamer.

---

Reply to #3:
Thanks for looking at that and your conclusion (which I've noted). Looks like I'll have to re-think all that then as it's not going to be that smooth using Windows.

---