Reorder Files inside Folder

Question

I have about 30K songs in mp3. I already organized/tagged them with Musicbrainz Picard. But Picard made an excess of folders and subfolders inside each other because of the tags.

What I need now is a script to read each subfolder and move all the mp3 files inside the subfolder's folders to the main subfolder. For example:

 Music -  
   Offspring -
      Album 1 - 20 songs
      Album 2 - 30 songs
      Album 3 - 5 Songs
         Folder 1 - 2 Songs
         Folder 2 - 3 Songs
   Journey -
      Song Pack 1 - 2 Songs
           Packy 1 - 15 Songs
           Packy 2 - 20 Songs
           Packy 3 - 7 Songs
      Album 2 - 20 songs
      Whatever 3 - 10 Songs

After running the script they would be like this:

Music -    
   Offspring - All Songs inside THIS folder. Not inside subfolders of Offspring.  
   Journey - All Songs inside THIS folder. Not inside subfolders of Journey.   

And so on..

So all the music for each subfolder of each music group should not have any more subfolders and all songs inside their respective sub-subfolders should be moved to the main sub-folder of the music group.

So when I check Music and I see the Bee Gees then I KNOW that all the songs are right there and not inside some subfolder of Bee Gees.

NOTE - In some cases there are more than 20 recursive sub-folders. An example is: Music/Lady Gaga/1/Album/Lady Gaga/2/2/2/1/1/1/1/3/3Album 2/Lady Gaga/1/1/1/SONG.mp3. In this case I want these inside Music/Lady Gaga and to eliminate the rest of the folders.

Answer 1

I suggest the following (tested, but without warranty) script, to be run from the master directory, under which all artists directories live:

#!/bin/bash

for f in *; do
  find "$f" -mindepth 2 -type f -exec mv --backup=numbered -t "$f" {} +
done

for f in *; do
  find "$f" -mindepth 1 -type d
done |
  sort -r |
  while read d; do
    rmdir "$d"
  done

It also take care of duplicates and empty sub-directories removal.

Answer 2

Have a look at Easytag .

sudo apt-get install easytag

The scanner option (Scanner -> Rename Files and Directory) is capable to re-arrange your files based on parameters from the ID tag.

Example:

Artist/Track# - track name.ogg`: `%a/%n - %t

would result in:
Prince/07 - Purple Rain.ogg

Answer 3

If you have space enough to back up your music before you do this, you might want to do it. I tested it, but it comes with no warranty--if it breaks, you get to keep all the pieces.

I did this under the assumption (borne from your description) that you have a main folder subdivided by artist, further subdivided by album. If this matches your setup, continue.

In a terminal, cd into your music directory, and run this command (in bash):

for j in * ; do (cd "$j" ; (for i in * ; do (cd "$i" ; find . -name \*.[mM][pP]3 -exec mv {} . \; ) ; done)) ; done

If you have questions, just ask.

Answer 4

You might be able to modify the settings for Picard so that it doesn't create this directory hierarchy to begin with--tt is possible that it somewhat relies on these files remaining where it left them.