{"id":49,"date":"2009-08-23T21:09:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T21:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-admin\/2009\/08\/sorting-away-mp3-files-into-sub-directories-by-artist-name\/"},"modified":"2009-08-23T21:09:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-23T21:09:00","slug":"sorting-away-mp3-files-into-sub-directories-by-artist-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/sorting-away-mp3-files-into-sub-directories-by-artist-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorting Away MP3 Files into Sub Directories by Artist Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just published the post<\/a> where I introduced the great and useful tool Bulk Rename Utility<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I first wanted to include the content of this post into that one as well, but then decided to make it a separate post instead. The introductory post of BRU was already getting long enough, especially because I included suggestions and comments to the tool itself, which I originally intended to post at the tool authors support forums. But I wasn’t able to do that yet, so the post got pretty long and adding something else would just have been too much.<\/p>\n

I had a bunch of MP3 files dumped into a folder, several hundred of them. Songs by various artists. They came from some of my old MP3 CD-ROMs that I burned, when I didn’t have that many CDs (compared to today) and keeping things organized wasn’t much of a concern for me.<\/p>\n

Well, the amount of CDs grew significantly over the years, so sorting and grouping stuff became necessary to be able to find stuff. Also, the number of different music styles that I learned to enjoy increased. Mixing some of those styles is probably not such a great idea.<\/p>\n

The Task at Hand<\/h3>\n

Anyhow, the file names followed at least some logic. They usually started with the name of the artist followed by the title of the song, separated by a hyphen or dash (-) character. Some also included the album name or release year after the song title, in parentheses or without, spaces between names and the dash separator or without, using underscores “_” instead of spaces or spaces etc.?? <\/p>\n

There were usually more than one songs per artists, sometimes only 2 or 3 (singles) and sometimes entire albums. I wanted to create folders for each artist and move each MP3 file into the corresponding directory; a problem that I could not solve with the Bulk Rename Utility<\/a> yet (even though it has the option to extract ID3 meta data from MP3s and then do something with it, which I have not figured out yet).<\/p>\n

I did not want to do it by hand, because I still have some old CDs with MP3 files flying around where I would have to repeat this task again. So I ended up writing a little DOS BATCH Script to do the work for me.<\/p>\n

MP3 Cleanup\/Sorting Batch Script<\/h3>\n

The code for this script can be found below. You can also download the code via the link below. The ZIP archive contains next to the .BAT script file also a neat little intro to promote my web site RoySAC.com hehe.<\/p>\n

RoySAC-SortMP3FileBatchScript.zip<\/a><\/p>\n

The batch script performs the following set of tasks:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. look for MP3 files in the current directory and process each one of them <\/li>\n
  2. look for “-” in the file name (assumed to be the separator between artist name and song title) <\/li>\n
  3. parse the file name and extract the string before the first “-“, also trim trailing spaces <\/li>\n
  4. checks if directory with that name exists\n
      \n
    1. If not, create the directory (with the artist name) <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    2. move the current file into that directory<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The source code of MP3FileSort2Dirs.bat<\/strong><\/p>\n

      \n
         1:  <\/span>@echo off<\/pre>\n
         2:  <\/span>:: -------------------------------------------------------<\/pre>\n
         3:  <\/span>:: MP3 Cleanup\/Sorting Batch Script<\/pre>\n
         4:  <\/span>:: ------------------------------------------------------- <\/pre>\n
         5:  <\/span>:: 1. looks for<\/span> MP3 files in<\/span> current directory<\/pre>\n
         6:  <\/span>:: 2. looks for<\/span> \"-\"<\/span> in<\/span> file name (assumed to be <\/pre>\n
         7:  <\/span>::    the separator between Artist Name and Song Title)<\/pre>\n
         8:  <\/span>:: 3. parses string<\/span> before first \"-\"<\/span>, trims trailing spaces<\/pre>\n
         9:  <\/span>:: 4. checks if<\/span> directory with that name exists<\/pre>\n
        10:  <\/span>::   4.1 If not, it creates it (artist name)<\/pre>\n
        11:  <\/span>:: 5. moves file into the directory<\/pre>\n
        12:  <\/span>:: <\/pre>\n
        13:  <\/span>:: Batch Script by Carsten Cumbrowski aka Roy\/SAC<\/pre>\n
        14:  <\/span>:: visit http:\/\/www.roysac.com<\/span><\/pre>\n
        15:  <\/span>??<\/pre>\n
        16:  <\/span>setlocal enabledelayedexpansion<\/pre>\n
        17:  <\/span>cls<\/pre>\n
        18:  <\/span>::only list files with extension MP3, exclude directories<\/pre>\n
        19:  <\/span>for<\/span> \/f \"tokens=*\"<\/span> %%A in<\/span> ('DIR \/A-D \/ON \/B \"*.MP3\"^|SORT \/REVERSE'<\/span>) do<\/span> (<\/pre>\n
        20:  <\/span>  call :PERFACTION \"%%~A%\"<\/span><\/pre>\n
        21:  <\/span>)<\/pre>\n
        22:  <\/span>echo.<\/pre>\n
        23:  <\/span>echo Done!<\/pre>\n
        24:  <\/span>echo.<\/pre>\n
        25:  <\/span>pause<\/pre>\n
        26:  <\/span>goto<\/span> :EOF<\/pre>\n
        27:  <\/span>??<\/pre>\n
        28:  <\/span>:PERFACTION<\/pre>\n
        29:  <\/span>::look for<\/span> dash in<\/span> file name, parse str before dash<\/pre>\n
        30:  <\/span>for<\/span> \/F \"tokens=1 delims=-\"<\/span> %%B in<\/span> (\"%~1\"<\/span>) do<\/span> (<\/pre>\n
        31:  <\/span>::trim trailing spaces from parsed string<\/span>  <\/pre>\n
        32:  <\/span>    set str=%%~B%<\/pre>\n
        33:  <\/span>    for<\/span> \/l %%a in<\/span> (1,1,31) do<\/span> if<\/span> \"!str:~-1!\"<\/span>==\" \"<\/span> set str=!str:~0,-1!<\/pre>\n
        34:  <\/span>)<\/pre>\n
        35:  <\/span>call :PROCFILE \"%str%\"<\/span><\/pre>\n
        36:  <\/span>goto<\/span> :EOF<\/pre>\n
        37:  <\/span>??<\/pre>\n
        38:  <\/span>:PROCFILE<\/pre>\n
        39:  <\/span>::check of directory exists and move file<\/pre>\n
        40:  <\/span>set f2=\"%~1\"<\/span><\/pre>\n
        41:  <\/span>if<\/span> {%~x1}=={} (<\/pre>\n
        42:  <\/span>   echo %f2%<\/pre>\n
        43:  <\/span>   if<\/span> NOT exist %f2%  MD %f2%<\/pre>\n
        44:  <\/span>   move \"%~1*.MP3\"<\/span> %f2%<\/pre>\n
        45:  <\/span>)<\/pre>\n
        46:  <\/span>goto<\/span> :EOF<\/pre>\n
        47:  <\/span>??<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
      <\/p>\n
      I hope you found this post and script useful. Let me know via the comments section of this blog post below.<\/p>\n
      <\/p>\n
      Thanks and Cheers!<\/p>\n
      <\/p>\n
      Carsten aka Roy\/SAC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
      I just published the post where I introduced the great and useful tool Bulk Rename Utility. I first wanted to include the content of this post into that one as well, but then decided to make it a separate post instead. The introductory post of BRU was already getting long enough, especially because I included […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.roysac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}