Thursday, 16 August 2012

So damn true: "Necessity the mother of building cool stuff"

Few days back, some hardware issue with my hard drive left it irrepairable and all my data was lost including softwares, movies, music. (Thank god I use github to host all my projects).

Now loss of movies and softwares is no big deal. But finding one's song collection is difficult as one has a particular taste for music. But good for me all that music is stored in my IPod. But as we all know Apple doesn't allow one to copy music files from IPod to computer. So what I did was look around some way to get my music from IPod to PC. I opened the IPod in USB storage mode and looked at where the files are stored. I found all the files but they were stored with random (unrecognizable) names in it. So for starters I copied all those files to my PC. Then I looked for a way to get the files some understandable names. But naming around 1000 songs listening to each one is not the way a geek would do it. So then I wrote this java app that scanned through all mp3 files and read the ID3 tags to get the song title and renamed all songs. Cool so it scanned all files and did the task in few minutes. Then I thought why not modify it a little and let it scan through your entire computer and look for mp3 files, rename them using song title and store them in a single directory where the songs are categorized in subdirectories using the album  name or artist name. In this way all the duplicates of a single mp3 would also be removed.

So this Mp3Manager is a console utility in java that takes as input the name of root directory to store all your music files and type of categorization to use to store the music files in directories(album name or artist). It is available on github

Read the readme.md to know how to use it. Let me know if you like it or if you would like any modifications to it.