The music classifying nightmare

Somewhat related but as I've been building a rails project I've been meaning to open source the song parser I've been building alongside it. It scans an mp3 and pulls out the artists along with the type of role they played on the song. Here's a quick gist I pulled from my model:

https://gist.github.com/3680949

Some examples:

Drake - The Motto (Jon Bellion Cover)

=> [["Jon Bellion", :cover], ["Drake", :original]]

David Byrne and Brian Eno - Strange Overtones

=> [["David Byrne", :original], ["Brian Eno", :original]]

Cheri Coke, MELO-X - Free

=> [["Cheri Coke", :original], ["MELO-X", :original]]

Avicii - Street Dancer (Whelan & Discala Remix)

=> [["Whelan", :remixer], ["Discala", :remixer], ["Avicii", :original]]

RAC - Hollywood featuring Penguin Prison (The Magician Remix)

=> [["Penguin Prison", :featured], ["The Magician", :remixer], ["RAC", :original]]

And a ridiculous example:

Eight, Nine & Ten (Eleven cover - Song name feat. One, Two & Three (Prod. by Four) (Five & Six remix) (Seven cover)

=> [["One", :featured], ["Three", :featured], ["Two", :featured], ["Four", :producer], ["Five", :remixer], ["Six", :remixer], ["Seven", :cover], ["Eight", :original], ["Nine", :original], ["Ten", :original], ["Eleven", :cover]]

If there's any interest, I'd love to turn it into a proper github repo and accept some pull requests.. it's far from perfect (both code-wise and generally) but works well for most cases.

I don't think there is a perfect way to organize a music collection in a hierarchical manner, so I don't even bother. Good tag metadata and foobar's search does all the work for me.

To me, the purpose of a filesystem is not to implement fine-grained categorization, but to provide basic grouping of related files so that I can easily operate on them all at once. To this end, my music collection mostly consists of one folder per album in a root music directory. Folders are usually named "Artist/Group Name - Album Title". That naming scheme doesn't always fit (albums featuring various artists, soundtracks in which I'm more likely to care about the title of the work rather than the artist that composed it, etc), but I don't try to separate soundtracks from regular albums or anything like that, I just throw them in the same root directory. With this scheme, it's easy to delete/share/transcode an album when it's contained within a single directory, convenient for people I share with, and I don't waste any time obsessing over something that I rarely need to see.

Some people have advocated a more database or metadata-oriented approach where you strip all metadata from the filename and folder hierarchy and stuff all your files in one directory. It's an interesting idea, for sure, more closely resembling the way web services like Youtube store their content. It makes one begin to imagine a desktop operating system that featured a metadata database as the primary filesystem organization scheme in place of the traditional hierarchical filesystem.

With our currently available tools, however, having some kind of useful metadata in the filename and/or filesystem hierarchy, even if it is redundant, is incredibly useful when performing manual file manipulation, especially the aforementioned sharing of files. You'd need ubiquitous categorization metadata in files (that is, not just ID3 and company for music files) and ubiquitous support for parsing this metadata in everyday applications (that is to say, when beginning a download of a song or a document, your web browser would show you the relevant metadata and hide the filename, if it exists. when opening a file, one would have to be greeted with a search box instead of a traditional hierarchy dialog) before we could ever entirely transition from having meaningful filenames to having meaningless hashes, timestamps, or garbage as the primary identifiers of files.

You mean by having a guy to ask where to find something because you're lost in the store and can't find shit?

This sounds like exactly the kind of problem that relational databases were designed to solve. You can organize it with an entity-relationship model fairly easily. Once you have stored your information in a database, the filename doesn't really matter as long as each mp3, ogg, etc. gets a unique name; you can look up the file by querying the database for files that have the properties you care about.

This is the shitty python script I use to organize music, which seems to work pretty well except in one case[1]: https://gist.github.com/3681165.

For the love of god, try it on a small sample of your music or it will wreak all kinds of havoc and you will yell and curse my name.

What it does: takes a directory of folders with MP3s, and makes them into the a directory of folders like yourdir/[ARTIST]/[ALBUM]/[TRACK No.] - [Track name].mp3. More importantly though, I believe it handles unicode correctly, and it's just over 100 lines of code, so you could adapt it to whatever system you prefer.

Find the python library called Mutagen that deals with parsing ID3 tags and put it in the same directory as this horrible script.

[1]: The one case it handles spectacularly poorly is when you have an album with multiple artists. This could be a soundtrack, a compilation, or even that thing that happens especially often in rap where the artist is like "[Some dude] ft. [Some other dude]". Honestly, I just handle those cases manually, but it might not be that hard to make the script do it right.

By the way, I've really only run this script on Windows. There are undoubtedly some tweaks that should be made to make it work correctly on Unix-y systems.