I have a load of fully tagged albums, each of which is in it's own directory. Each of these albums is currently stored in c:\mp3.

I need an automatic way to sort these directories by genre but:

1. The album's directory name must stay the same.
2. All files, including non-music files e.g. pictures/txt files must remain in the directory.

Basically I don't want to change anything about the directory apart from it's location.

I envisage having a c:\genres directory, with sub-directories like "Hip-Hop" "Funk" "Jazz" etc. The program would look in c:\mp3 and examine the first track, from the first directory. It would read the ID3 genre field and then move the whole directory to c:\genres\genrename. The program would then repeat the process with the next album in C:\mp3.

Does anything like this exist?

As it happens, I'm want to organise as c:\genre\year\ but I figure I could just repeat the process using the year field instead of genre.

thanks

foobar2000 has a feuture called rename copy or move files, it does almost exactly what you asked to, you can sort all your music in folder structures just according to the tags in a file.

MP3Tag is a great utility for this.

I'll assume from your first post that your directory structure is
C:\mp3\album\

In that case your string for the file move/rename utility in foobar would look like (assuming you don't want to rename your mp3 files) -

%genre%\%date%\$directory(%path%)\%filename%

In the dropdown boxes, choose 'Move entire parent directories', check the box next to 'Remove empty directories left', and choose 'C:\genres\' as your output directory.

You can test this with a copy operation first if you want.

Thanks for all the replies. This looks really good.

One question though - if there were 2 tracks in the same album that were tagged with different genres, would the album be split, or would the whole thing be moved to the genre of the first track examined?

The file renamer reads each track individually. Now since you're moving entire parent directories, I'm not sure how this will work. I don't know if it moves the directory contents immediately after the first mp3 is processed (and to the same location) or if it moves contents after the last mp3 of a folder is processed (and to its location).

If it's the first scenario, then everything will end up in the %genre% of the first mp3. If it's the latter, then tracks with different genres will get split up and the 'folder.jpg' or any other file (cue, log) in the folder will go with the last mp3.

Actually, can a developer chime in on this and explain how the process goes? I've been wondering about this for a while now.

This method has been working perfectly for me for the last couple of years.

I'm thinking of switching things up a little though. Is there a complete list of the syntax that can be entered into the filename section?

At the moment I'm using Genre\Artist-Album-Year but these folders are starting to get pretty big. I'm thinking of splitting them up by groups of years e.g. "g:\hip-hop\1985-1990\artist-album-year". I figure it wouldn't take too long to do this by hand if you sorted to Genre\Date\Artist-Album-Year, but it wouldn't surprise me if foobar had a way of doing it.

If anyone has any other alternative sorting methods (using genre as a base) then I'd be interested to know what works for you.

Cheers

AFAIK it's in the Titleformatting Help or sth...