How to automate the process of organizing audio files on Windows

Question

My library is a mess and manually organizing it in Windows Explorer is painful.

I know MediaMonkey Gold provides tools to automatically organize your library folders, however are there any open-source or free tools that can also organize files automatically?

Here is what I would like to accomplish:

I currently have a single folder with all of my music files inside it. I want to organize the files like this:

c:\music\<file_format>\<artist_name>\<album_name>

e.g.
C:\music\mp3\artist\album
C:\music\vob\artist\album
etc.

Answer 1

I recommend using foobar2000 along with the context operation File Operations > Move To.

Here is a link to a wiki article with all the details.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

I've found J. River Media Center to very capable of such things. As with some of the others mentioned here, you'll have to spend a bit of time learning it. There's a very active forum that provides good help with that. With an expression language that includes regular expressions, its advanced capabilities are definitely pitched at techies. It is a commercial product, but there's a free, fully-functional trial version that works for 30 days.

Answer 3

iTunes, for all it's faults and bloat, has been my favorite for organizing my music. If you really don't like the program, use it at least to set up the structure and put the songs in place, and then remove it and use a different tool for the playing of the music.

Answer 4

mp3tag will do this, assuming you want a music player agnostic solution. Assuming everything is tagged properly, something like c:\music\%_codec%\%artist%\%album%\%title% in the "tag to filename" option under "convert" will do the trick.

mp3tag should be able to automate nearly any music file management, assuming you take the time to learn it