Music Folder Organiser

[pwatk]

I've setup Subsonic on my small home server and I'm looking for an application to quickly reorganise the hundreds of music folders I have.

I've kept everything organised for a very long time as genre/artist - album/track but now I want to change this to genre/artist/album/track.

Does anyone have any suggestions before I'm forced to start writing a long winded script?

Thanks.

[Shador]

Easytag is extremely powerful. I just checked and found out it has a subfolder recursion option in the right-click menu, when clicking onto a folder. So it should be a breeze to change it, also I've never done it on that scope yet.

[ElderDryas]

Bulk Rename for the mass renaming of the Folders/Files (if desired) and Easytag for the re-tagging of the files. I've used both to reorganize ~10K music files...it wasn't a "one-click" solution, but it works well and fast.

[pwatk]

Bulk Rename for the mass renaming of the Folders/Files (if desired) and Easytag for the re-tagging of the files. I've used both to reorganize ~10K music files...it wasn't a "one-click" solution, but it works well and fast.

Well your method got the job done but I nearly lost my sanity in the process

[ElderDryas]

Welcome to the club...remember, there's a 50 USD initiation fee, payable to me.

Seriously, I don't really think there <is> an easy way to do it.

[Shador]

Yes, there is. EasyTAG offers support for batch scanning names from tags, batch modifying tags and batch renaming files. I never used that batch renaming feature on my whole collection. Just on parts, when adding new stuff or correcting some tags. But as I mentioned previously for the whole collection it should work too, although the UI needs some getting used to:

1. Select the top folder of your music collection in the left pane
2. Right-click somewhere in that pane and enable recursion/subdirectory search
3. Wait for your collection to be scanned then select all files in the middle pane with Ctrl-A
4. Press the button (Scan file(s)) with the vertical green bar at the top of the window
5. Select renaming of files in that dialog and enter a rule like this: /home/shador/Musik/library/lowq/%a/%y/%b/%n - %a - %t
6. Next to the dropdown menu there's the same button with a green vertical bar again. When you press that button all selected files are renamed according to your rule.
7. Now close that window and apply the changes by clicking the save button in the top
8. You're prompted for every file and each action (rename, retag) whether you really want to do it, but you can also confirm it for all files
9. Possibly you're prompted about not being able to delete some old directories because their non-empty. Happens e.g. if you have some non-music files like cue-sheets in your library.
10. Done

Once you found out how the features of easytag which you need work, it's actually quite straightforward and extremely fast to carry out that tasks. I wouldn't want to miss easytag anymore, as it's so powerful.

[gapan]

I find Ex Falso (part of the quodlibet package) much easier to use than easytag. Easytag has some additional functionality, but I just can't stand its interface.

If you have all your tags set up properly, it's very easy to do what you want with Ex Falso. Just select the root directory of your music files, right click on it, Select all subfolders and you'll get all your music files on the lower left portion of the window. Select them all, go to the Rename files tab and specify your naming scheme. It will automatically create and move all files according to their tags. Just make sure that when you rename your files you put them in a new root directory. For example if your music is in ~/music, when renaming put them in ~/music-new. I'm telling you that, because although it will move all files to their new names/locations, it will not remove the old directories. So if you give a new name to the new path, you'll be left with the original directory filled only with empty subdirectories.

The only potential problem with this is if you have other kinds of files next to your music files (cover images, pdf files etc). They won't get moved. But I don't think easytag can do anything about those either, can it?

In my opinion though, nothing beats a small shell script. It shouldn't be hard to write one, I don't think it would take more than 15-20 lines of code.

[thenktor]

I'm using EasyTag all day for my tagging. It is very powerful, but the UI really is a mess. I'm experienced with it, so it's not to hard, but I remember the days as beginner This popup window stuff, where you actually do the mass tagging/renaming is totally annoying. Also I still don't know how to define batch jobs.

BTW & off topic:
I never understood why someone wants to use "genre/artist/album/track" A lot of artists change their genre over time, so you do put the same artist into different genre directories? Also there are a lot of albums where you can't be sure about the genre, IMHO these are hard to find then. So what's your point of view? I prefer "artist/year - album/track"

[pwatk]

5. Select renaming of files in that dialog and enter a rule like this: /home/shador/Musik/library/lowq/%a/%y/%b/%n - %a - %t

Now you tell me . TBH I should have looked harder.

In my opinion though, nothing beats a small shell script. It shouldn't be hard to write one, I don't think it would take more than 15-20 lines of code.

I thought so too but for some reason I couldn't work around the spaces in file names and directories when using a for loop. I'm sure I could have worked it out given time but I lost my patience with it in the end.

I never understood why someone wants to use "genre/artist/album/track" A lot of artists change their genre over time, so you do put the same artist into different genre directories? Also there are a lot of albums where you can't be sure about the genre, IMHO these are hard to find then. So what's your point of view? I prefer "artist/year - album/track"

I have a few main genres and a massive 'unsorted' folder . I'm considering ditching the genre directories now though as I think a simple A-Z of artists will work better for Subsonic.

[Shador]

I thought so too but for some reason I couldn't work around the spaces in file names and directories when using a for loop. I'm sure I could have worked it out given time but I lost my patience with it in the end.

Use

Code: Select all

IFS='
'
for i in list; do

or something like this:

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find ... -exec
find ... -print0 | xargs -0