A small program to tidy music files. It recursively explores a given directory and standardises folder structures, file naming conventions and ID3 tags.
NOTE THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND AS SUCH SOME OF THE FEATURES MENTIONED BELOW ARE NOT YET IMPLEMENTED. THE PROGRAM MAY NOT CURRENTLY BE CONSIDERED FIT FOR PURPOSE.
In more detail, the program recursively explores a given directory tree and, for each song it finds extracts data about it from three different potential sources:
- The file path when it is of the form
ARTIST/ALBUM/SONG.mp3, where ALBUM can optionally include a year and SONG can optionally include a track number. All folder/file names are cleaned to fix capitalisation issues and any symbols (e.g. for-example and FOR.EXAMPLE). - The ID3v1 tag (accepting: v1.0 / v1.1 / extended versions of either).
- The ID3v2 tag (accepting: v2.2.x / v2.3.x / v2.4.x).
This data is collected and then merged together based on string similarity (hopefully removing errors such as the addition of " EP" to the end of album names and general typos). A voting procedure is then undertaken between files from the same folder in order to standardise artist/album names across them (e.g. "AC/DC" "ACDC" "AC DC" "AC-DC"), although no change will be effected when this is not possible (e.g. compilation CDs or a single folder containing the user's entire music collection).
Finally this amalgamated and standardised information is applied back to the files to write both
ID3v1.1 and ID3v2.3.0 tags to them (by far the most common and flexible). Non-standard tag data will
not be deleted in order to preserve player preferences and settings (e.g. some players store the user's
song rating in the ID3 tag).
Additionally changes will be made to the directory (as a dry-run by default) tree, renaming files to
the form TRACKNUM TITLE.mp3. The directory names are also updated to accommodate the new names
(e.g. fixing misspelled album/artist names). An option is available to create a new folder structure
in the form ARTIST/ALBUM/SONG.mp3, should one not already exist. Compilation CDs will be
identified and stored in Various Artists/ALBUM/SONG.mp3 and will not be separated.
© Copyright 2013 Jonathan Simmonds.
The project is released under the GPLv3 license. This project also makes use of the Levenshtein Python Extension, released under the GPLv2 license and the enum34 Extension, released under the BSD License
- Clean up dependency packaging
- Add some type of voting procedure to decide on the correct album/artist name from files within the same folder.
- Implement the non-forced directory mode for when the directory structure cannot be relied upon.
- Add a method to rename files and folders.
- Add a method to create a new folder structure.
- Add a method to detect compilation CDs when indexing and avoid scattering these items around.
- Allow flexibility in file renaming conventions.
- It would be nice to be able to have the program produce several versions of the file at different bit rates for different device usage (e.g. mobile devices would take 128-196 kbps, desktop devices would take 320 kbps).
- Command line progress indicator.
- The
-dflag may not be ommitted. - Deliberately repeated words in song titles will be removed (for example if all songs in an album intentionally began with the word 'the' this would be removed).
- Any kind of compilation album is basically unsupported.
- Capitalisation of roman numerals is not preserved (e.g. XIV becomes Xiv).
- Words that are repeated on the majority but not all of the tracks in a directory are not stripped.
- Performance needs to be measured and ideally improved (though since this is ideally a 'run-once' program, performance is not a primary goal).
I also have a small test directory structure containing a few sample music files in the repository, however for copyright reasons I am not able to commit it. Should you want to work on the project I would recommend that you replicate this setup by copying a few albums into a folder in the repository for testing purposes.