[azido]

Speaking of music software, do you know any program that would automatically rename and move files to appropriate folders?

My problem is a tad complicated. Back in the times when .mp3 format was still a novelty I digitalised lots of casettes (google it up children if you're not old enough to know what a casette was) and also copied most of my CDs to my HD. Strangely enough, the drive survived all those years and now I have a decent collection of media. Yet, it's a complete mess: some songs are organised in the "..\Artist\Album\Artist - Song Title.mp3" manner, others are in "..\Artist\Song title.mp3", yet others in a huge directory with multiple genres massed altogether.

Now then, all of those files have proper ID tags now, but I can't seem to find a program that would automagically sort my media into appropriate folders. There was a similar functionality in Fekker's MIP, but alas it was buggy and didn't work well. Anyone?
Cheers

maybe if you call the cassettes "tapes" ppl think "oh yeah, my grandma had some" ~laughs~ (needless to say i still own hundreds of tapes i simply don't want to throw away)

hmm.. i'm pretty sure i saw some media organising software for win that created folders based on id3 tags and moved those with similar album names into them.. but cannot remember which one it was.

edit: have a google for "Id3ToFolder". it does exactly that.

[Halibutt]

maybe if you call the cassettes "tapes" ppl think "oh yeah, my grandma had some" ~laughs~ (needless to say i still own hundreds of tapes i simply don't want to throw away)

I called them casettes on purpose, as I still have some music on tapes as well. I mean reel-to-reel For instance a barely audible recording of Bob Dylan from Radio Free Europe. Boy am I old...

edit: have a google for "Id3ToFolder". it does exactly that.

Thanks, you're my hero! (Fekker, take note, will you? )

EDIT/If only this software supported non-standard Latin characters (not to mention Cyrillic fonts)...
Cheers

[azido]

I called them casettes on purpose, as I still have some music on tapes as well. I mean reel-to-reel For instance a barely audible recording of Bob Dylan from Radio Free Europe. Boy am I old...

Thanks, you're my hero! (Fekker, take note, will you? )
Cheers

oh my good... good old ones... man, you ARE old ~lol~

[fekker]

someone pop a trac ticket into umm for the tag to folder tool
also feel free to add all music to trac tickets for ideas / requests .. its coming up on the list soon

[sho]

MediaMonkey will sort by ID tags and even iTunes will do so (with a lot less degree of control though).
I have never had problems with any of my obscure native characters, your mileage may vary.

[azido]

MediaMonkey will sort by ID tags and even iTunes will do so (with a lot less degree of control though).
I have never had problems with any of my obscure native characters, your mileage may vary.

but will it also create folders based on tags and move files into them?
btw: as soon as i added FLAC codec to my system, mediamonkey refused to work under Win7 for any reason.

[Halibutt]

but will it also create folders based on tags and move files into them?
btw: as soon as i added FLAC codec to my system, mediamonkey refused to work under Win7 for any reason.

It doesn't seem so. There is some option called "Auto-sorting", but it's available in the Gold version and I'm not sure what can it do. Anyone confirm that?
Cheers

[AnalogKid]

iTunes will embed artwork IF you drag the artwork into the artwork window. It can also sort your music into the folders etc.... BUT, it has file name length issues and many folks feel uncomfortable with iTunes.... so

For a much simpler life.... mp3tag is excellent and allows multiple artwork to be embedded / extracted and solves all your tagging needs. It's a portable app (so doesn't need to be installed, or have .net dependencies etc)... and it can rename your files (including folders) based on the ID3 Tag. I use MP3Tag to handle over 1.5TB of mp3 (and the odd mp4, ogg, flac).

The system I use for tagging is as follows:

music\
--- waiting to be tagged\
------ someuntagged.mp3

--- tagged\
------ Artist\
--------- Album\
--------- track.mp3\

As I tag each file (or group of files) in the 'waiting' folder, I can then move (by renaming to a new folder) the tagged files into the relevant 'tagged' folder with automatic generation of the Artist and Album subfolders.

It can also export any embedded album art in the MP3's to folder.jpg (or any filename you desire) to the same folder as the mp3 file :-)

This is all STANDARD capability. You can also extend it with your own scripts, but I've rarely had to use this.

[azido]

iTunes will embed artwork IF you drag the artwork into the artwork window. It can also sort your music into the folders etc.... BUT, it has file name length issues and many folks feel uncomfortable with iTunes.... so

For a much simpler life.... mp3tag is excellent and allows multiple artwork to be embedded / extracted and solves all your tagging needs. It's a portable app (so doesn't need to be installed, or have .net dependencies etc)... and it can rename your files (including folders) based on the ID3 Tag. I use MP3Tag to handle over 1.5TB of mp3 (and the odd mp4, ogg, flac).

The system I use for tagging is as follows:

music\
--- waiting to be tagged\
------ someuntagged.mp3

--- tagged\
------ Artist\
--------- Album\
--------- track.mp3\

As I tag each file (or group of files) in the 'waiting' folder, I can then move (by renaming to a new folder) the tagged files into the relevant 'tagged' folder with automatic generation of the Artist and Album subfolders.

It can also export any embedded album art in the MP3's to folder.jpg (or any filename you desire) to the same folder as the mp3 file :-)

This is all STANDARD capability. You can also extend it with your own scripts, but I've rarely had to use this.

i also use mp3tag for my tagging needs, but as far as i understood, he already has good tags, so the only thing left for him is to get his stuff sorted to dirs that reflect a good order of data. imho mp3tag can't handle a big pool of single files to be sorted into different dirs automatically based on the tag - you would still need to treat those files manually (i.e. mark all files that are on one album, then rename them by tag, then move them out to another folder.)

i guess he was looking for a way to automate this, thus is where id3tofolder come in handy. too bad it has character issues. might be because it's a german app.

[AnalogKid]

i also use mp3tag for my tagging needs, but as far as i understood, he already has good tags, so the only thing left for him is to get his stuff sorted to dirs that reflect a good order of data. imho mp3tag can't handle a big pool of single files to be sorted into different dirs automatically based on the tag - you would still need to treat those files manually (i.e. mark all files that are on one album, then rename them by tag, then move them out to another folder.)

i guess he was looking for a way to automate this, thus is where id3tofolder come in handy. too bad it has character issues. might be because it's a german app.

No, it can do that in one fell swoop....
Set the Tag to Filename converter to use this:

C:\Music\%band%\%album%\$num(%track%,2) %title%

or

C:\Music\%artist%\%album%\$num(%track%,2) %title%


%band% is the 'album artist' (preferred) and %artist% is the actual track artist

This will cause mp3tag to move the files into the above structure :-)

Of course, he can modify the above structure to suit his needs.


I also have a manual script for mp3tag that will 'copy' his MP3 collection to a new structured format (to test), then he can delete his original layout once he's convinced it works!

[azido]

No, it can do that in one fell swoop....

ah yes.. true, i forgot about the variables that will expand to dirnames in that case. rarely had a big pool of single mp3 files so i never used them in mp3tag.

[Halibutt]

i guess he was looking for a way to automate this, thus is where id3tofolder come in handy. too bad it has character issues. might be because it's a german app.

Yeah, character issues are a problem if you have lots of music from around the world - like me. Also, the app doesn't seem to delete emptied folders, one has to do it by hand. Yet it seems to work nicely. I will give the other app a try as well. Thanks for the links guys.
Cheers

[sho]

To sort into folders via ID tags with MediaMonkey (the free version), right click on the desired files and select Auto-Organize Files.
From there you have a pretty decent flexibility on how you want to organize your media.

[Halibutt]

To sort into folders via ID tags with MediaMonkey (the free version), right click on the desired files and select Auto-Organize Files.
From there you have a pretty decent flexibility on how you want to organize your media.

Thanks, after a night or two my music library finally looks kind of acceptable. I lost most of my cover art in the process, but that is a minor problem.
Cheers

[steve1977]

In the absence of a management problem to facilitate, I have started to manually add fanart.jpg and folder.jpg into my artist folders. Looks as follows and works well:

/Beyonce/Album_1/
/Beyonce/Album_2/
/Beyonce/folder.jpg
/Beyonce/fanart.jpg

I am applying this to the folder structure done by ITunes and above works nicely. Have issues with my compilations. They look like below:

/Compilations/Buddha_Bar_1
/Compilations/Fast_Furious
/Compilations/Buddha_Bar_2

XBMC nicely groups the Buddha_Bar albums together (given the album artist being the same). However, I dont know where to place the corresponding folder.jpg and fanart.jpg? Not for the album, but for the artist?

Any thoughts?