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I have, as of right now, around 7000 music track on my harddrive. However, it is not organized very well, there is instances of duplicates an so on and so forth.
I need to have it organized as it is somewhat hard to find the music people want to listen to at the bar I'm working at.
I do not intent to do this manually, so I wanted to ask for your suggestion as to how this problem is best solved.

I know of course that various audio players can index the music for me, but I also need it organized physicly on the harddrive.

I personally see no other to solve the problem than writing a piece of software to do the job, but I'm not a "great" programmer and thus chances are that I will ruin it all in the process. If I was into linux, which I know has some very powerfull tools which could probably solve this problem, this of course wouldn't be a problem, but while I do have linux (debian) installed on my computer, I do not know how this could be done nor if there would be any complications regarding the fact that it is stored on a ntfs partition.

Thanks

I just used a mp3 tag editor and put all of the songs by the same artist together, renamed them to a standard (all lowercase etc..), and then labeled them by album, then put them in their own folder..

band name -> album -> songs

that's my folder structure.

Itunes does it for you automatically.

Itunes may index it, but I doubt that is will actually rename and move the files around on the disk as needed.

@01000101
Which mp3 tag editor might that be?

iTunes will move the files around the hard drive automatically. It has an option where it will show you a list of duplicates so that you can decide what is actually a duplicate and whether to get rid of it.

As JamesM said, it does exactly what you want.

Well that is something I need to investigate then.
Thanks for now.

mp3tag
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

i personally hate the itunes interface, but that has little relevence to its underlying functionality.

7000 number at $1 a song gives $7000 dollars of music. You are a wealthy man if you paid that amount of cash for songs. Though spread over a number years it would be less terrible but still a lot.

<warning>
If you did not pay then hmmm.. not so legal and it would be ill chosen to advocate it here. Unless you live in the Netherlands where pure downloading is legal and uploading is not.

In short OSdev does not and will not advocate, endorse, etc or be part of any illegalities and hopes that none of it members will not either.
</warning>

On the subject, as our members are all saint , for sorting mp3tag is imho also the best option.

lmao. well at least my choice was supported through all that illegal music bashing. =)

and 7000 songs isn't THAT much, i have probably 2000 legit tunes from buying CDs and bundles, and I'm pretty picky on what I listen to.

@os64dev
First of all, it is not important in any way wether or not my music is payed for or not. This is not the point as the subject has nothing to do with sharing illegal music.
It might as well have been a problem with my car, which i don't have, and that could very well be stlon as well.

Second of all, the music is actually payed for, sort of. As the bar, vere it is used, pays around $10.000 a year to be allowed to play it in public.

os64dev wrote: Unless you live in the Netherlands where pure downloading is legal and uploading is not..

really? greedy little effers. =)
why don't they share with the rest of the world haha.

It's legal to download and backup music here in Canada, so the legality issue isn't relevant to this thread, The OP didn't exactly say where he obtained the music, they "theoretically" could have manifested as the result of random magnetic interference with his hard drive.

Organization is the topic at hand, I'd personally, toss everything in a directory and be done with it.

Brynet-Inc wrote:Organization is the topic at hand, I'd personally, toss everything in a directory and be done with it.

...and next use the <j> button in winamp (i love that feature)

winamp is nice as well, but I just use WMP as it does what i need it to, and it comes with windows lol.

they "theoretically" could have manifested as the result of random magnetic interference with his hard drive

my hard drive is full of songs like this, for example, i have all the albums of nirvana that appeared instantlly on my HD due to the ozone layer hole.

organisation of music is best as 69 stated:

artist/album/title.mp3

a good player will produce a title from the path, example, winamp
[size=0]( that is faster than WMP and free, and non M$, but not free for PUBLIC playback)
then, about the copyright... ones the album is produced, sold to 1 000 000 pieces, and the artist earned ~ 100000$ for his work, the music don't have to make money at all. it is music, not money factory[/size]