songanizer 0.8

Songanizer is a shell script to organize a directory containing a collection of MP3 files. The goal is to create virtual directory structures, which give different view of the data, but without having redundant copies of the files themselves.

The files are organized according to information gathered from the tags of files stored in subdirectories located under the base directory, which bear the prefix _data in their name. Parallel virtual directory structures containing symbolic links to the actual files are created, which give different views of the same data. Each virtual directory stucture gives a view based on a particular attribute specified by the user. The _data directories themselves can be symbolic links to directories on other devices, and can have multiple levels of sub-directories within them holding the actual song files.

After songanization, the BASE directory will contain the following directories:
(i) _data* --> All directories starting with _data contain the real data.
(ii) _artist --> Contains the link structure on the basis of the artist tag.
(iii) _genre --> Contains the link structure on the basis of the genre tag.
(iv) _initial --> Contains the link structure on the basis of the initial.
... and more, depending on the switches passed to the script

Since Songanizer is a shell script, a running shell is the first and foremost requirement. Preferably it should be a Bourne Again SHell. You may report problems encountered on any shell to the project maintainer.

Getopt (enhanced) is needed to extract the options from the command line arguments. Alongwith that you should have gettext for internationalization support.

The mp3info tool should be installed in the system to process the file tags. It can be downloaded from http://ibiblio.org/mp3info/.