Fun with mp3s and cleaning up cluttered directories.

A little instruction sheet on how to clean up a MP3 collection, or rip your CD’s for best performance.
I recommend ripping the CD’s into flac files, then putting the CD away for safe keeping. If you have small kids like mine, you might not have the CD very long. I’m recommending flacs, because this is the highest quality format that still retains 100% of the sound quality, and if later you want to convert to something else, like 320 vbr mp3, or vbr ogg files, you do not have to rerip your CDs. Ripping and originally tagging files is very time consuming.
Process to rip good mp3s/flacs/Ogg files.
  Issues Linux Solution Windows Solution
1 Sort your CD’s    
2 Line up more then 2 machine if you can, multiple cdroms might help a bit but not much.    
3 Ripping the CD to format of choice Sound Juicer – Flac EAC/Lame VBR-b 96 -m j -h -V 5 -B 320 –lowpass 19.7 -q 0 –vbr-new
4 Converting flacs to Mp3 in mass. perl script sound converter

Process for cleaning up a collection of mp3 files.

  Issues Linux Solution Windows Solution
1 Check mp3′s for issues, are they worth messing with? check_mp3, delete_bad.ksh, mpck MP3Check
2 Properly Tag and Name them Picard, EasyTags, cmv.pl Music Brains/Picard or MusicMatch/Supertag
3 Properly Sort them sort_mp3s  
4 Delete empty directories left after sorting del_empty_dirs Workout something similar to:FOR /F “tokens=* ” %d IN (‘”DIR /ad/b/s *rootmp3workdir*|SORT /r”‘) DO RM /q “%d”
5 Put albumart in directory, or into the mp3 file albumart MusicMatch/Supertag
6 Index them into your player collection amarok itunes

Additional things that might come up.

  Issues Linux Solution Windows Solution
1 join spliced files joinsplit chopper from IBM
2 check files with crc, PAR2 files process_par2 Quickpar or PAR2Cmdln
3 extract files from rars unrar script WinRAR or RAR Cmdln
4 extract zip files unzip script WinRAR or RAR Cmdln
5 recursively decend into directories and do stuff to files recurse_filesystem.pl FOR /D /R . %d in (*) DO %d or SWEEP.exe

If you want to do this recursively you need to run a recursive type program or a framework that will decend into the directories doing the things you want. – ctsu.pl

An excellent player for LINUX using kde desktop is Amarok, lots of neat things you can do with it. Its a bit of a pig on resources, if thats an issue try mplayer, gmplayer, or xmms

Generally I will not try to fix vbr or mp3 frame issues, if its a bad mp3 your better off going back to your CD’s and resourcing it.

unrar.txtscript that wraps the unrar binary, to create a directory if the first rar file of a set, or a single rar, contains more then 1 file and no directory in the archive.

sort_wmas.txtSorts directory of wma’s into an organized set of directories.

sort_oggs.txtsorts your cluster of ogg’s that are all in 1 directory into an organized set of directories.

sort_mp3s.txtSorts directory of MP3′s into an organized set of directories.

sort_flacs.txtorts flacs, based on their tags, ussually this is an APE or ogg.

process_par2.txtThis program runs par2 against all the par2 file sets, this will repair file sets that are not missing to many chunks.

joinsplit.txtIs a program that joins split, a split or csplit file.

delete_bad.ksh.txtDescription

del_empty_dirs.txtdel_empty_dirs deletes emptry directories below where it was run.

check_mp3.txtchecks mp3 files for errors, renaming them to bad_(filename).
I’m going to release the ctsu.pl program, later, I need to clean it up quite a bit.

Leave a Reply

For spam filtering purposes, please copy the number 2236 to the field below: