Reorganizing music library

[CWuestefeld]

I'm trying to reorganize my music library. Not edit the tags -- I think I've got that squared away thanks to MusicIP, etc. -- but get the files themselves straight.

I'm not 100% confident of how well it will work, so I want to do it as a Copy operation rather than Move. I just hooked up a 300GB disk just for the job, so I've got more than enough room for it. This is an absolute requirement, and it disqualifies my normal library manager MediaMonkey.

I want to do it according AlbumArtist/AlbumName, which obviously means that the tool must support the AlbumArtist tag. That seems to disqualify my other tagging tools -- TheGodfather and Zortam.

Can anyone suggest to me an alternative that can satisfy these requirements?

Bonus points if it can provide a higher-level structure of alphabetic selector (an A folder containing all AlbumArtists starting with A, etc.), but that would be easy enough to do by hand afterward.

[Lashiec]

foobar2000 FTW. It takes care of everything, including the Album artist tags, and it includes a ridicule number of predefined renaming patterns. You can also use its script language to tailor the proposed pattern and create the A-Z folders as well, so everything will be set up in one operation, it will probably involve the use of the $cut(X,Y) or the $left(X,Y) function with %artist% as the X, and 1 as the Y. Mp3tag can take care of it as well, just it will be less straightforward.

EDIT: Errr, no, it would involve the use of %album artist%

[CWuestefeld]

I just tried foobar2000. It doesn't seem to work. It appears that the %album artist% tag doesn't work here. In most, if not all cases, it's not picking up the data that I had set in MediaMonkey. I also suspect that it didn't find all of my songs, but I can't see any way to verify this -- there's no report I can find that would give me even a total count of them.

I haven't tried mp3tag yet; from the website I can't see how my task could be accomplished.

Can anyone else offer further suggestions?

[Grorgy]

I did something similar recently with J River Media Centre, though I didnt use album artist, I used album but still, if you have it it could be worth a try, its a bit pricey just to do that with in my opinion.

[Lashiec]

I just tried foobar2000. It doesn't seem to work. It appears that the %album artist% tag doesn't work here. In most, if not all cases, it's not picking up the data that I had set in MediaMonkey.

-CWuestefeld (October 12, 2008, 06:57 PM)

If foobar2000 finds a custom tag which can not map to its predefined set of fields, it usually shows it up with <NAME OF THE TAG> in the Properties window. foobar sometimes fails to read all tags (for example, if they use an unsupported codepage), but I don't think MediaMonkey does this. So, to use such custom tag, you have to enclose its literal name in %%

I also suspect that it didn't find all of my songs, but I can't see any way to verify this -- there's no report I can find that would give me even a total count of them.

Drop the directory that contains all songs in a playlist, go to View -> Playlist Switcher and voilà. Alternatively, if you're using the media library, activate the album list, right click on "All music" and then select "Properties".

I haven't tried mp3tag yet; from the website I can't see how my task could be accomplished.

Again, you have to drop the files in the file view, and go to Convert -> Tag - Filename, and play with the tags there. To create folders in such dialog, you have to use something like %name of one tag%\%name of another tag% IIRC, the syntax is pretty similar to foobar.

[CWuestefeld]

I'm getting closer...

It looks like MediaMonkey actually writes AlbumArtist into Band. I'm not yet sure if it does this consistently; if so, it's easy enough to work around.

[brett]

Looked for something myself just the other day.
Wanted it to be simple, my search found this

Id3ToFolder

Its very basic, read the tag and move accordingly.

Sorted my collection very nicely.

Reorganizing music library
Gui says it all really, no bells, no whistles, just do the job please.

from the website

Description:
Id3ToFolder helps you sort your music files. It reads out the id3 tag and creates folders and subfolders for every album, artist, year or genre. Id3ToFolder can read MP3(Id3v1 and Id3v2), Ogg Vorbis and Windows Media Audio files. Version 2.1 features new function for working with whole directories. Version 2.12 enables sorting for genres. Version 2.2 adds filerenaming. Version 2.21 adds "Bitrate", "Genre" and "Comment" to folder naming.

Freeware from what i can tell.

Brett

[CWuestefeld]

It looks like I have to sacrifice the Copy-only operation.

Foobar just wasn't able to handle the job. It's got problems reading tags. (It also has problems writing tags, claiming that some files are "Access Denied", despite my verification that they are accessible). I verified in mp3tag that the desired tags are there, but Foobar is just ignoring them.

So I turned to mp3tag, which absolutely handles anything tag-wise, and can do the reorganization. Unfortunately it can only do this as a MOVE operation, so I'm sacrificing my current folder structure and its content to make this work.

And now it sounds like my new hard drive that I'm copying it to is going bad, making shrieking noises. I'm now copying everything back quick!