Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

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mackerelmint
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Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by mackerelmint » Sat Jan 23, 2021 9:47 pm

I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's had this problem.

Over the years, players I've used have "organized" things for me instead of just hewing to the folders and subfolders I had. Albums with more than one artist got separated and dispersed. Incorrect album art was found and populated throughout. Random things like bootlegs and demos and songs from friends' bands ended up with this picture of Tupac Shakur attached, and no matter how hard I try to root that out and get rid of it, it never seems to work. It's like a Tupac virus has infected my music folders. I've got MusicBrainz Picard, and I'm trying to learn that to see if it can get it all dealt with, but it's not as intuitive as I'd been led to believe and I'm wondering if it's even actually up to the task, because I haven't been having much luck.

Anybody got any suggestions? I use linux, but I could do this on Win7, too. I'm close to nuking a huge part of my music and re-ripping and downloading things.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by bogmummy » Sun Jan 24, 2021 10:37 pm

About three years ago I got tired of trying to manage my music with all of the issues you mentioned and I decided to just dump everything on an external drive and toss it in the drawer.

Now I just stream everything, except for any recordings, obviously. No worry about space on my phone, computer, etc. And can find almost everything I need on Spotify, other wise usually YouTube. Truly liberating

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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by mackerelmint » Mon Jan 25, 2021 3:33 am

HAHAHAHA oh man, I have DEFINITELY tried the "toss it in the drawer" method. :D

Thing is, I don't really care to use spotify and pay money for access to music I already own. And there's a lot, like a LOT of my stuff that spotify just doesn't have or isn't often available. That's a problem when they take things down, or only put up like half of an album or something.

I've kinda been going through it and dealing with it and have made some headway doing it the old fashioned way, but it did involve me deleting a bunch of stuff and reacquiring it in a non-garbly version. There are a couple of folders I've simply labeled "this is a mess", and they'll stay that way for the foreseeable future. It's progress. I'll take it.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by wingnutkj » Mon Jan 25, 2021 5:49 am

I use MP3Tag to sort out that kind of thing. It lets you edit all of the metadata tags and the attached images, and does a load of extra clever stuff like renaming files/moving them into different folders based on the tag values, connecting with various databases to get album information, and all that good stuff.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by mackerelmint » Mon Jan 25, 2021 6:09 am

thanks, I'll look at it. Picard is supposed to do that, and really does a nice job of identifying and grouping and automatically fixing tags and organizational problems, but... I'll be damned if I can figure out how to get it to make the folders and put the stuff in them.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by Shadoweclipse13 » Tue Jan 26, 2021 11:07 pm

That sounds like a huge pain in the ass. I'm VERY anal about how my music is organized and take extra precautions to make sure that how I want them organized is set before I ever rip CDs into iTunes. I've got all my Star Wars soundtracks, which are various composers, set as "Star Wars" for the artist, and the composer in parenthesis at the end of the album name. Just so I can listen to them all together. I always put the number of the album before the title, so I have an artist's albums in order of chronological release.

I've never had album art attached to music like that, so I've got no advice for you there, sorry. But as far as the basic organization, one thing I frequently do is make a new folder and drop the stuff I want to keep, or that's been organized already, into, almost like a quarantine.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by ThePearDream » Wed Jan 27, 2021 8:48 am

I'll second wingnutkj's recommendation of mp3tag. I used that for years to work on my mp3 files. With the right formatting strings it will move things into whatever folder structure you want and it can definitely fix album art issues.

As for organization, I just use a folder for each artist and the albums are named with the original release date and title, like: "(yyyy.mm) album title", this keeps things chronological. Any stray tracks from comps, soundtracks, etc. go into a dedicated folder without a date called something like "misc" or whatever and it automatically falls at the end of the directory by not having a number at the beginning.

Soundtracks and compilations just go into a dedicated folder. Mp3Tag will let you set separate album artists and song artists to the same file, which is really useful for these tracks.

And all of those random tracks (like if you have one song from Ernest Tubb or Dio or whatever) get dumped into a folder, like an island of misfit songs.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by Shadoweclipse13 » Wed Jan 27, 2021 8:58 pm

ThePearDream wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 8:48 am
I'll second wingnutkj's recommendation of mp3tag. I used that for years to work on my mp3 files. With the right formatting strings it will move things into whatever folder structure you want and it can definitely fix album art issues.

As for organization, I just use a folder for each artist and the albums are named with the original release date and title, like: "(yyyy.mm) album title", this keeps things chronological. Any stray tracks from comps, soundtracks, etc. go into a dedicated folder without a date called something like "misc" or whatever and it automatically falls at the end of the directory by not having a number at the beginning.

Soundtracks and compilations just go into a dedicated folder. Mp3Tag will let you set separate album artists and song artists to the same file, which is really useful for these tracks.

And all of those random tracks (like if you have one song from Ernest Tubb or Dio or whatever) get dumped into a folder, like an island of misfit songs.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by Stratelejazzuar » Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:52 am

My music folder starts out looking like a big dresser - you check the top drawers first and stuff is sorta messy but it's okay cuz it's frequently used, but as you start digging, you find out the whole thing is like a bunch of junk drawers. "Does this still fit me? Is this dirty laundry? Why do I have 3 of the same shirt?"

Then I'll delete an album I downloaded because an ex liked the band, and then because feel organized, I'll reward myself by taking a few months off from the music folder junk drawer. :whistle:

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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by budda12ax7 » Sun Jan 31, 2021 8:47 pm

Same thing here....just dropped all my music spanning 12 years of MP3’s across 4 different laptops onto one 512 gb card and filled that fucker up. I organized it on my windows 10 machine in the downloads area. Organize by artist, date or whatever. I wound up with maybe 400 lost songs put into a unknown folder. I can access everything in my Hiby as artist or album or genre. It worked for me....I delete all album art so no issues.

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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by Lame Pseudonym » Sun Oct 31, 2021 5:36 pm

I'm pretty organized with 45rpm singles. Less so with albums. Not at all with classical LPs, because I just log the record number and can do through index cards by number.

But that's not why I'm here. I'm here to mention that Those Krazy Kids Nowadays don't use folders at all. They have no culture or history of using folders. They just search. So it looks like keywords are the future. But you gotta be real organized with those because a keyword list can go to hell real fast.

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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by soggy mittens » Sun Oct 31, 2021 6:24 pm

I use foobar2000 as my music player (windows only tho) and every time I add stuff to my library it gets a tagID clean out and I also clean the tagging in the actual folder. I've been doing this for twenty years so it is all perfect and clean and exactly how it should be, I take pride in my library and will never stream for a single second nor will I entertain lossy for a single second. Also yes it is annoying that there are no uniformly accepted method for tagging, different groupings and different people all have their own styles and it is unfortunate but once you're on top of your library it is easy enough to maintain. I wish I could help as my brain loves this sort of thing but this is your fish to fry. xD Saying that if I can help in anyway.... I mean I've never had to do any massive batch editing, foobar2000 can but you'd still have to do it individually for certain sections.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by luau » Sun Oct 31, 2021 6:36 pm

mackerelmint wrote:
Mon Jan 25, 2021 6:09 am
thanks, I'll look at it. Picard is supposed to do that, and really does a nice job of identifying and grouping and automatically fixing tags and organizational problems, but... I'll be damned if I can figure out how to get it to make the folders and put the stuff in them.
I've used a bash script and a command line tag editor to do exactly that. It's easy enough but the results are only as good as the tag data. I'd be happy to work something up for you if you're interested.

edit:

This uses the id3info tool to fetch the tag data and it's probably already on your system. Pass the source directory and the destination directory to the script and it'll search every file in source directory for tag info and then, if it finds something, it'll create dest_directory/artist/album directories and copy the file into it and name it song. It doesn't modify anything in source_directory, just copies out of it.

sh script.sh ~/unorganized_mess ~/organized

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

source_directory="${1}"
dest_directory="${2}"

IFS="
"

for f in $(find "${source_directory}" -type f); do
    tags=$(id3info "${f}")
    artist=$(echo "${tags}" | grep TPE1 | sed -e 's/^[^:]\+://' -e 's/^\s*//g' -e 's/\s*$//') 
    album=$(echo "${tags}" | grep TALB | sed -e 's/^[^:]\+://' -e 's/^\s*//g' -e 's/\s*$//') 
    song=$(echo "${tags}" | grep TIT2 | sed -e 's/^[^:]\+://' -e 's/^\s*//g' -e 's/\s*$//')
    if [ ${#artist} -gt 0 ] && [ ${#album} -gt 0 ] && [ ${#song} -gt 0 ]; then
        new_directory=${dest_directory}/${artist}/${album}
        mkdir -v -p "${new_directory}"
        cp -v ${f} "${new_directory}"
    fi
done

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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by panoramic » Mon Nov 01, 2021 5:16 am

bogmummy wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 10:37 pm
About three years ago I got tired of trying to manage my music with all of the issues you mentioned and I decided to just dump everything on an external drive and toss it in the drawer.

Now I just stream everything, except for any recordings, obviously. No worry about space on my phone, computer, etc. And can find almost everything I need on Spotify, other wise usually YouTube. Truly liberating
this is what my ultimate answer was. I've also gone back to using physical media. I have a lot of vinyl and cds hanging about suddenly but I am done playing shit on my computer unless it's spotify.
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Re: Guys, my music folder is a god damned disaster area and I need to deal with it.

Post by mackerelmint » Mon Nov 01, 2021 1:53 pm

luau wrote:
Sun Oct 31, 2021 6:36 pm

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Wow! Thanks! I'm gonna give this a try after I take a nice nap. :)
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