How I sorted All My Mp3′s With a Simple Bash Script

Claus Witt — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0000

First of all, the headline is a lie. I am in the process of copying all mp3 files that we in our household have had on a number of different machines to one central server, which all computers talk to via webdav. But since we have had a lot of different naming schemes and ways of sorting files we needed some sort of uniform naming of files and directories. We decided on the ever so nice /Artist/Album/01_Title.mp3. But since we have a lot of mp3′s, this seemed a daunting task.

In comes bash. 6 lines of code is all it takes.

#!/bin/bash
end="/destination/dir/of/mp3s"
find -type f -name *.mp3 -print0 | while read -d  $'\0' file; do
        mkdir --parent "$end"/"$(mp3info -f -p %a "$file")"/"$(mp3info -f -p %l "$file")"
        mv "$file" "$end"/"$(mp3info -f -p %a "$file")"/"$(mp3info -f -p %l "$file")"/"$(mp3info -f -p %n "$file")"_"$(mp3info -f -p %t "$file")".mp3
done

The small program mp3info is used to extract id3 tags from the files. (Fortunately they are entered for almost all files). I am not the greatest bash-hacker in the world, so there might be a better way to do this. But I have tested this, and it works, and is quite fast.

If you know of a better way to do this, please comment. I would love to learn.

Claus Witt » mp3

How I sorted All My Mp3′s With a Simple Bash Script