Music Conversion

Me and Ducore (or Ducore and I)are working on tidying up and standardizing/sychronizing our music libraries, and I figured this would be a good place to brainstorm ideas/get stuff written down so its not just in our heads.

Here is the agreed upon format:

/[music root]/[Artist]/[Album]/[track number (zero padded)] - [Track Name].mp3|ogg

if you dont know the track number or if it is not applicable, then it is "xx"

There are more specifics for special cases that can be added later in comments. Eventually, a document should be written up to capture all of the rules. If I were more proactive and had more time right now, this post would be that document. However, I mainly wanted to use this post to propose a method of automating filename conversion, which Ducore thinks is imprcatical, and I intend to find a method to prove him wrong.

here is my newest idea:

1)use some program (eg, Amarok, rhythmbox, cantus, etc) to determine any tracks that do not have Artist/Album/TrackNumber/TrackName in the id3 tag. use said program to retreive this information from cddb if possible. Also, at this point try to identify duplicates and trash files as much as possible.

2)create a playlist containing only the files that have the aformentioned id3 tags. extract a list of filenames from the playlist file.

3)write a script that will loop through this file list and for each file extract the track name and number using "id3info" and rename the track to "[number] - [name]". We could also be more proactive and move it to the appropriate directory as well, but for teh most part, things should already be in the right place. This removes any reliance on file names already being formatted in any particular way. after this is done, only a relatively (hopefully) small number of files will need to be done by hand.