A while back (quite a while now), I wrote a quick post on using bash to combine a handful of tools to organize your music collection on Linux. Weesa also mentioned being a neat freak, and wanted to know how to do it. So here is the way I do it on Windows using QMP.
The first step is to, obviously, get, and install QMP. It’s actually now called QCD after the latest beta rounds, but can be downloaded from their site. Once installed, run the program, and select the “Add To Library” button. You can either select to add files, or add whole directories. If you’re as messy as I used to be, you might have them lumped in one directory, in which case the “directories” option is probably the best. Select the files/folders you want to add, and hit OK.
Once you’ve added the tracks to your library, you should see them appear at the bottom. If not, you may have to click on a different category on the right (for example “Years”), and back to “All Audio Tracks” to get them to appear. You may notice that QCD has already started working on your music for you. In the “MusicID Status” column, it shows what it’s up to. If you’re lucky, QCD might be able to find all of your tracks, if not, a little leg work might be needed. If you notice some aren’t matching up, you can right click on the track, or tracks if you want to do the whole album, and select the option “MusicID: Identify tracks…”.
This will give you the ability to select the album, and track information, for the files that you’re trying to match.
Once you’ve finished matching up all your music, it’s time to start organizing. In theory, if you have a nice set of IDv3 tags already assigned, you can skip the identification steps. The first step is to bring up the tag and filename editor. This is in the same place as the “MusicID” options used above. From the first tab, you can update the track information to include more data from the MusicID databases. If you simply click the “From Media Library” option, it’ll grab all the extra information, and put it in. Once done there, simply hit the “Write Tag” button.
Next is on to the “File Renamer” tab. From here, you have a whole selection of options for renaming the files. However, I didn’t like the selection I had. So clicking on the “Editor” button brings up a dialog box that will allow you to define your own. I built mine in the format artistTrk\album\01 - title. This made the editor use the artist track, the album name, the track number, and the track title.
Once setup, save the template, and then hit the “Rename File” button, and watch your music collection become organized!!