Organizing MP3's - The other circle of hell

[Bells]

So, today i noticed i wasn't being very productive and said "what the hell, migh as wall organize my media files"

Lo'n behold i found out i have around 5000 mp3's in a single folder...

I'm not overly diligent about music organization... but overall now i'm at least trying to keep it organized by Artist. Multiple albums with nearly no identification don't bother me that much... if i want to listen to Metallica i normally just want to listen to Metallica, not "That one full album from Metallica and nothing else" this also leads to the annoying personal issue of a couple of bands and artists having a single folder with one or two songs in them.... but oh well, no system is perfect...

Funny enough, organizing the behemoth by hand is just no fun! So i'm looking for automated ways to do so and not screw it up.

So, please, share you Mp3 woes here and suggest solutions!

[A Zarkin' Frood]

Mmmh, as far as I remember a lot of media players offer that. For example iTunes, but fuck iTunes, it does it without asking and is terrible anyway, people who use iTunes are terrible.

I do know Winamp offered that, though I haven't used that in years, you could determine how the folders were split up, I think, but by default it was Artist-Album. However, I'm not sure if it only does that to files you have on an MP3 player or a flash drive (which is basically a MP3 player without the ability to play MP3s)

Why do you want to organize your files like that anyway? I mean, I have them organised like that. But another thing media players do is actually kind of organize your files for you, not on the drive but within the media library. Is that not an option for you for some reason?

[Bells]

Music organization inside a media player i already can do with just windows media player, that part works fine, my issue is just 3 nitpicks:

sometimes i want to listen to a very specific song, and i a dumbass so instead of filtering the song inside the mediaplayer i go to the actual music folder to look it up, which turns into me filtering by eyeball my songlist in search of that one audio file that might or might not be properly named

Other times i want to pick just a few favourites to place on my Mp3 Player to go on the road, and trimming down 24gb to just 2 or 4gb of music files just seems easier when everything is already organized in the folder...

And most of the times i just get into my maniacal side that needs everything organized with German-Like precision....

Mind you that there is a fair assumption to be made here that pretty much 1/3 of the songs i have on my PC were given to me from ripping albums from friends and family and that i have actually never heard the songs... they are just there in case i feel like "finding new bands", which is the only explaination i have to offer to my Justin Timberlake folder...

[A Zarkin' Frood]

Mh, well, then my only suggestion would be to copy your music to a flash drive (Don't cut and paste. Wait till it's done and then delete them in case something goes wrong) or something else that Winamp recognizes as an MP3 player and use Winamps feature to copy your files to disk (you'll can change the way the folders and subfolders will be split in the preferences, I think), I mean, unless you have a 24 gig flash drive you'll have to do it multiple times, but it's still faster than doing it by hand at least. But as I said, I have no idea how winamp is these days, I switched to Foobar long ago. Also: It'll only work if all the files are properly tagged. There are some tools that let you auto-tag files, though. Last time I checked Winamp had that feature too, so does Foobar.

As far as I know there are no tools that have the sole purpose of re-organizing your on disk mp3s, though.

[Bells]

So, i've spend... i think, around 4 maybe 5 hours in this?

i got this software, Mp3 Organizer. It says it will do exactly what i wanted... it will pick all the songs in my "Music" folder, and put them into proper folders using a "Artist - Album" tag to define sub folders...

Thing is... it only does 99 songs at a time, after that i need to wait 30 seconds + a few more for each round to do it again. Am i'm now rolling on 500 seconds per cycle. No idea of when it's going to end...

So, i kinda feel that with each cycle i "level up" ... reminds me of Progress Quest. The futility of it all! i don't even know if this damn thing is working... but at least it's free, i wouldn't want to go looking for a cracked version of this thing... specially if it does what it says it should do.

if it doesn't i'm going to be royally pissed though...