Thoughts on Reorganizing my MP3 Collection...


Results 1 to 8 of 8

Thread: Thoughts on Reorganizing my MP3 Collection...

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    280

    Thoughts on Reorganizing my MP3 Collection...

    Hey Again Everyone,
    Last spring I graduated college. I lived in a party house, and being skilled in computers, I decided to build a media center for me and my five roomies. The thing worked great; MythTV for television, and a thin client in the kitchen to DJ the music.
    I had a samba share available so my room mates could just dump their music collection from their machines on to the media center. Adding new songs was their problem, and not mine. As you can imagine, nobody really wanted to organize the music to well. Many of them just dumped in the tunes and then searched for it in GMPC (a great interface for MPD by the way).
    So over a year later, I have 150GB+ of music which is mostly unorganized. I need a way to put some order to the chaos... I tried using EasyTag for a while. Don't get me wrong, it's a great program. But sorting through every directory and song would take me DAYS, time I just don't have.
    I need a way to SAFELY rename and organize all of the music into a logical file structure. My initial thought was to just connect an external hard drive, copy it all into iTunes on some laptop, and then recopy the then organized iTunes database back onto the media center.

    Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do with this mass of music that has absolutely no order? Thank you everyone for your time.

    -- Devsforev

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Helsinki, Finland
    Posts
    86
    I'd write a shell script to read the filename, then query parts of the filename from www.gnudb.org and musicbrainz.org. Based on the return results the script would give a number of possible options from which to select the correct artist, album, song along with selection options "insert details manually" and "skip file".

    Based on the user input the script would then rename the file to selected format (e.q. "Artist - Album - Song.mp3"), update the id3 and id3v2 tags via a command line tool (e.q. id3v2) and the update the details in the mythtv mysql database (usually db: mythconverg table: music_songs).

    If the user input is skip, I would tag the file by adding some tag to the filename. I would also tag files that have been processed in case I want to quit editing and continue later.

    I'd estimate that writing the script would take some five hours and going through the music collection several days.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    Gatineau Quebec
    Posts
    823
    Can't you just use a script to use your audio decoder get genre of music for each individual mp3?
    I think for example with flac files, you can use metaflac to get out all metadata from each file. This can be done too for all your mp3s and oggs.

    You definitely want to order it by genre first. and then like this:

    genre -->artist (alphabetically) -->album/work(alphabetically).

    To me anyway that would make sense.
    Linux user #367409

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Location
    Denver,Colorado
    Posts
    21

    Wink

    I just re-did my collection. After searching for a bit, I came across Ex Falso. You can run your music in batches to correct your titling, etc.

    Here is the homepage:
    http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/

    Some reviews:
    http://lifehacker.com/316670/organiz...-with-ex-falso

    http://galigio.org/2008/07/20/ex-fal...tor-for-linux/

    http://fosswire.com/post/2007/10/fix...with-ex-falso/

    It really worked well for me. Easytag is ok for doing simple fixes per song but Ex Falso was awesome at letting me do complete batches for my collection.

    JD. Brown

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Location
    Somewhere, Texas
    Posts
    9,627
    Quod Libet looks interesting, I'll have to look into that to see how it handles things. I've been happy with Easy Tag myself but I also have everything pre-organized in directories Artist/Album because I already know what I have (I am the one that bought the CD after all )

    iTunes handles things in an odd way, like a drunk doctor giving a physical...since I have a 6th gen iPod any Linux tool I use with it ends up trashing it and I have to restore so I got stuck with using iTunes in VirtualBox. Editing tags and reloading the iTunes library so they are listed reasonably is a chore itself!

    Thanks for that tip Mr. Brown hope it's useful to the OP as it might be for me

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    San Antonio, TX
    Posts
    2,607
    Banshee will do the trick fine. Simply have it search every single song on the computer, then export all to an external disk as if it was a media player. Every song will be put into /Whatever/Artist/Album/Song_Name (or however you want to define it). You then have a completely organized (on disk) library.
    hlrguy
    Were you a Windows expert the VERY first time you looked at a computer with Windows, or did it take a little time.....
    My Linux Blog
    Linux Native Replacements for Windows Programs
    Mandriva One on a "Vista Home Barely" T3640 E-Machine runs great.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    280
    Thanks everyone for the responses so far! I've been looking into both Banshee and Ex Falso. Both seem to be great applications. Unfortunately, it would not be easy to write a shell script for this task; there is practically -NO- order to much of this collection. Some people sorted by genre/artist/song, others by artist/album/song, and still more just have a dump of every mp3 in one big folder. I would have to use a combination of ID3 lookup, directory names, songs names, etc to even begin to formulate some sort of file structure manually. A GUI with these indexing features already build in seems to be the only practical way to sort this collection IMO. I'm going to explore both Banshee and Ex Falso more. If anyone has any further opinions/advice, I'd love to hear them.

    Thanks again!
    -- Devsforev

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    San Antonio, TX
    Posts
    2,607
    Well, if the ID3 tags are correct, even if you start with every MP3 file on one super huge directory, after transferring to the external disk, they will all be sorted in directories based on the ID3 tags. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Try dragging a playlist of say 200 songs to the external drive and check it out.

    hlrguy
    Were you a Windows expert the VERY first time you looked at a computer with Windows, or did it take a little time.....
    My Linux Blog
    Linux Native Replacements for Windows Programs
    Mandriva One on a "Vista Home Barely" T3640 E-Machine runs great.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •