Some sort of magical music sorting program?

[xBlizzDevious]

Hello!

 

I've built up a significant music collection over the years and I now need to sort through it.

 

I use dbPoweramp to convert all of my music into MP3*** and to sort it into folders with the following hierarchy: "[artist]\[album]\[title] - [artist] - [trackNo].mp3" and I love having all of my music sorted as such.

 

Now, It's an amazing program and sorts all of my music effortlessly and the same company made another really good program: PerfectTUNES. However, I opted into the beta of that program years ago and now it's out, my beta copy doesn't work anymore and I ain't paying £35 for something to delete duplicates of my music.

 

 

 

So, is there such a program or number of programs that can achieve the following:

 

- Sort my music into folders as above (preferably without having to re-convert in between).

- Find and apply tags (title, artist, album, etc) by whatever means. TrackID from Sony seems to know every song in the world so it'd be kinda cool if there was some way of using that to sort my music. I'd also like various artist compilation CDs to be separated into each artist and the album that that song was from, and so on.

- Find duplicates of files whether it be by looking at metadata or if it is by comparing the actual audio files

- Any other music file sorting things that I've possibly forgotten or not even thought of!

 

Thanks in advance!

 

***No hate please; I personally can't tell the difference between a true FLAC file and an MP3 128kbps so I don't see the point in storing all of my music as FLAC

[Jonny.Wong.16]

The software that I use is Headphones because it runs as a plugin on my FreeNAS box, but it's a bit difficult to get it setup and working. It should be able to do everything you listed except finding duplicates.

[xBlizzDevious]

The software that I use is Headphones because it runs as a plugin on my FreeNAS box, but it's a bit difficult to get it setup and working. It should be able to do everything you listed except finding duplicates.

 

Huh. Thank you very much. This looks kinda like what I'm needing. Except for the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing with it. Would you mind writing some instructions on how to do the things I asked above - or linking to a guide that does?

 

By flicking through the settings, it seems that it has some sort of torrent integration - is this just so that you can easily download more music from popular torrent sites or is there a more legal use?

 

It looks like it wants to take files from one folder and move them to another when sorting, rather than moving files from within one folder to another place in that folder - is it possible to do that (if you understand what I'm trying to say)?

 

How do I go about getting it to update a song's tags for me?

 

Thanks!

[Jonny.Wong.16]

Huh. Thank you very much. This looks kinda like what I'm needing. Except for the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing with it. Would you mind writing some instructions on how to do the things I asked above - or linking to a guide that does?

 

By flicking through the settings, it seems that it has some sort of torrent integration - is this just so that you can easily download more music from popular torrent sites or is there a more legal use?

 

It looks like it wants to take files from one folder and move them to another when sorting, rather than moving files from within one folder to another place in that folder - is it possible to do that (if you understand what I'm trying to say)?

 

How do I go about getting it to update a song's tags for me?

 

Thanks!

 

There are instructions on running it on windows here. You will need to install Python first.

 

The torrent integration does exactly that, but you don't need to use.

 

I believe it can sort within the same folder, but just to be safe I would just rename the root folder, eg. Music -> MusicUnsorted, and have Headphones sort back into Music. If that made sense?

 

All your songs will be updated automatically with tags/metadata from MusicBrainz, an open source music database.

 

EDIT: Lifehacker has a great article on a lot of other software that would probably work better.

[xBlizzDevious]

There are instructions on running it on windows here. You will need to install Python first.

 

The torrent integration does exactly that, but you don't need to use.

 

I believe it can sort within the same folder, but just to be safe I would just rename the root folder, eg. Music -> MusicUnsorted, and have Headphones sort back into Music. If that made sense?

 

All your music will be updated with tags/metadata from MusicBrainz, an open source music database.

 

Yeah, I've got it running; I'm not that incompetent - haha! But it's the settings and configuration that's not so simple. I think I've set it up how I want it, but it just seems to be doing hundreds of things and then not doing anything else.

 

As far as I can tell, I've set a folder for "Sorted Music" and it's reading from my actual library, but nothing is going into my Sorted Music folder. Does it have to finish it's scan, or does it only do that with converted and/or downloaded music? If it does actually sort all of the tags, re-converting it with dbPoweramp will move everything to the right folders, but it's going to waste a lot of time just converting files from the format they're in to the format that they're in.

 

If a simple program that does just that part doesn't already exist, surely it won't be too hard to make a program that would? I've got some basic-mediocre programming skills and could probably write up a simple C# WinForms program to take a directory and then read all files from it and place them in a new directory based on tags. I'd just need to know how to read MP3 tags first.

 

But, I'm lazy, so is there a program that could do that for me, is do I just have to run that from within Headphones somewhere?

 

EDIT: I have set the folder scheme I want in the settings, it just doesn't seem to actually move anything as said above.

[Jonny.Wong.16]

Yeah, I've got it running; I'm not that incompetent - haha! But it's the settings and configuration that's not so simple. I think I've set it up how I want it, but it just seems to be doing hundreds of things and then not doing anything else.

 

As far as I can tell, I've set a folder for "Sorted Music" and it's reading from my actual library, but nothing is going into my Sorted Music folder. Does it have to finish it's scan, or does it only do that with converted and/or downloaded music? If it does actually sort all of the tags, re-converting it with dbPoweramp will move everything to the right folders, but it's going to waste a lot of time just converting files from the format they're in to the format that they're in.

 

If a simple program that does just that part doesn't already exist, surely it won't be too hard to make a program that would? I've got some basic-mediocre programming skills and could probably write up a simple C# WinForms program to take a directory and then read all files from it and place them in a new directory based on tags. I'd just need to know how to read MP3 tags first.

 

But, I'm lazy, so is there a program that could do that for me, is do I just have to run that from within Headphones somewhere?

 

EDIT: I have set the folder scheme I want in the settings, it just doesn't seem to actually move anything as said above.

 

Yeah, I've found Headphones to be a bit finicky.

 

So in Settings > Quality & Post Processing, you've set the Path to Destination Folder to "Sorted Music"? Also Move downloads to Destination Folder is checked?

Try going to Settings > Download Settings and set Music Download Directory to your existing library folder.

 

Then go to Manage > Force Actions and Post-Process Single Folder to test to see if it's working.

[xBlizzDevious]

Yeah, I've found Headphones to be a bit finicky.

 

So in Settings > Quality & Post Processing, you've set the Path to Destination Folder to "Sorted Music"? Also Move downloads to Destination Folder is checked?

Try going to Settings > Download Settings and set Music Download Directory to your existing library folder.

 

Then go to Manage > Force Actions and Post-Process Single Folder to test to see if it's working.

 

Ah, ok. I'll try that later. I'm just downloading the MusicBrainz server image to run in VirtualBox as I was reading around the wiki and they said that it's much quicker and more reliable to do so. And I do have ~19k songs to sort with a 0.3mbps upload...

[xBlizzDevious]

Yeah, I've found Headphones to be a bit finicky.

 

So in Settings > Quality & Post Processing, you've set the Path to Destination Folder to "Sorted Music"? Also Move downloads to Destination Folder is checked?

Try going to Settings > Download Settings and set Music Download Directory to your existing library folder.

 

Then go to Manage > Force Actions and Post-Process Single Folder to test to see if it's working.

 

Ok, so I've downloaded and set up the musicbrainz server using VirtualBox and I can log into it just fine. I set the options in Headphones to use custom and localhost on port 5000 (default) and then rescanned my media. It didn't seem to work and outputs the following:

20-Sep-2014 15:30:20 - ERROR   :: Thread-12 : Uncaught exception: Traceback (most recent call last):  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\headphones\logger.py", line 204, in new_run    old_run(*args, **kwargs)  File "C:\Python27\lib\threading.py", line 763, in run    self.__target(*self.__args, **self.__kwargs)  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\headphones\librarysync.py", line 106, in libraryScan    f = MediaFile(song)  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\lib/beets\mediafile.py", line 1166, in __init__    self.mgfile = mutagen.File(path)  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\lib/mutagen\__init__.py", line 247, in File    fileobj = open(filename, "rb")IOError: [Errno 22] invalid mode ('rb') or filename

Having said that, I think I know what the problem might be... The file in question uses Japanese text.

 

EDIT: Yup. That seems to be the problem. It did it again for another file so I changed that and rescanned. It seems to be going through them just fine now. I think I've probably got a few more foreign charactered file names so this might take a while. Is there a way to search with Windows and find all files with anything out of the ordinary?

[Jonny.Wong.16]

Ok, so I've downloaded and set up the musicbrainz server using VirtualBox and I can log into it just fine. I set the options in Headphones to use custom and localhost on port 5000 (default) and then rescanned my media. It didn't seem to work and outputs the following:

20-Sep-2014 15:30:20 - ERROR   :: Thread-12 : Uncaught exception: Traceback (most recent call last):  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\headphones\logger.py", line 204, in new_run    old_run(*args, **kwargs)  File "C:\Python27\lib\threading.py", line 763, in run    self.__target(*self.__args, **self.__kwargs)  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\headphones\librarysync.py", line 106, in libraryScan    f = MediaFile(song)  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\lib/beets\mediafile.py", line 1166, in __init__    self.mgfile = mutagen.File(path)  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Headphones\lib/mutagen\__init__.py", line 247, in File    fileobj = open(filename, "rb")IOError: [Errno 22] invalid mode ('rb') or filename

Having said that, I think I know what the problem might be... The file in question uses Japanese text.

 

EDIT: Yup. That seems to be the problem. It did it again for another file so I changed that and rescanned. It seems to be going through them just fine now. I think I've probably got a few more foreign charactered file names so this might take a while. Is there a way to search with Windows and find all files with anything out of the ordinary?

 

Glad you got it working.

 

A quick Google search found this script to find not ASCII file names: https://superuser.com/questions/237533/find-files-with-non-ascii-characters-in-filenames-in-windows-xp

 

Other links as well:

https://superuser.com/questions/636247/how-do-i-remove-non-ascii-characters-from-filenames

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17870055/how-to-rename-a-file-with-non-ascii-character-encoding-to-ascii

 

I'm not sure if any of these will work.

[xBlizzDevious]

Glad you got it working.

 

A quick Google search found this script to find not ASCII file names: https://superuser.com/questions/237533/find-files-with-non-ascii-characters-in-filenames-in-windows-xp

 

Other links as well:

https://superuser.com/questions/636247/how-do-i-remove-non-ascii-characters-from-filenames

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17870055/how-to-rename-a-file-with-non-ascii-character-encoding-to-ascii

 

I'm not sure if any of these will work.

 

Cheers. It could be handy for finding stuff some other time, however, it's not an issue any more as it's managed to get through the rest of the files, it seems. Now I'm getting this error:

 

21-Sep-2014 20:33:18 - WARNING :: Thread-21 : Attempt to query MusicBrainz for The Red Hot Chili Peppers failed (retried 3 times, caused by: HTTP Error 503: Service Unavailable)21-Sep-2014 20:33:23 - INFO    :: Thread-21 : No results found for: The Red Hot Chili Peppers

 

I was getting another error before but that's because I hadn't started up the virtual machine. That's what appears once I did. Any idea what's causing that?

[Jonny.Wong.16]

Cheers. It could be handy for finding stuff some other time, however, it's not an issue any more as it's managed to get through the rest of the files, it seems. Now I'm getting this error:

21-Sep-2014 20:33:18 - WARNING :: Thread-21 : Attempt to query MusicBrainz for The Red Hot Chili Peppers failed (retried 3 times, caused by: HTTP Error 503: Service Unavailable)21-Sep-2014 20:33:23 - INFO    :: Thread-21 : No results found for: The Red Hot Chili Peppers

I was getting another error before but that's because I hadn't started up the virtual machine. That's what appears once I did. Any idea what's causing that?

 

HTTP Error 503 is MusicBrainz rate limiting queries. Not sure why that would occur though since you're running your own VM.  :unsure:

[xBlizzDevious]

HTTP Error 503 is MusicBrainz rate limiting queries. Not sure why that would occur though since you're running your own VM.  :unsure:

 

Hmm. I'll try wiping and re-installing the VM as maybe something went wrong there. But I wouldn't think so. Only other thing that I could suspect is causing any sort of issue is the way Headphones is interacting with it. Should it find it without issue on 127.0.0.1:5000? I mean, it is on this computer, but it's running through a VM, so technically it's not, right?

 

 

EDIT: Nope. Same thing.