My Music Organisation Process

Well I've been organising and converting my music collection, which is a mixed bag of formats. I've tried tidying it up before with mixed success. It's still a bit of a task but it's coming along.

This post is just about the method I've finally settled on and what seems to be working.

The biggest problems I've previously come across are tagging correctly, unknown albums and multiple formats. I've narrowed down the tools I need to cover all possibilities I've come across and built a handy little set that seems to do the job without installing too much stuff I will never use.

These are:

Sound Converter
MusicBrainz Picard
Quod Libet
and the command line tool BinChunker

By using these four tools I have managed to overcome just about every issue I've had. The only thing I have not sorted out is album art. I've not really looked into it yet as my priority was to sort the actual music out for easy access and cataloguing and so stuff will play to my media players around the house.

My first thought was "How am I going to store the files ?". I will be storing everything on an external Hard disc connected to my PC with Mint Olivia running as its operating system. This made my choice of file system to use wide but limited as well. I did some research.

fat16 / fat32 = too old and newer file systems seemed better at dealing with faults.

exFat = This is the system designed with USB sticks (Pen drives or whatever) in mind. It looked modern and what I was looking for but it has a flaw. Linux support is not so good from what I read and the linux drivers are slow. As I will be using Linux machines mostly I don't want search delays and stuttering music. So this option was out.

ext3 and ext4 = My operating system is formatted in this so I thought, why not ? A lot of info (the bits I understand) seemed outdated saying ext4 was untested and stick to ext3. I decided to go the ext4 way.

 On settling with ext4 I started to format an external drive I had using gparted.
I hit a problem. The drive I had was a Western Digital external drive and it would not allow me to write to it after the ext4 formatting unless i was in ROOT. A little investigation showed me the drive uses WD Elements which seems to be an external piece of software held with the driver chip and not on the Hard disc itself. This is there to do various tasks that work very well on a Windows based machine but the WD forums basically leave you on your own as a Linux user. Not being able to bypass this block without spending too much time I abandoned my choice of ext4 and made a new decision.

NTFS = After my previous choice was made too difficult to proceed with I was left with just the one. I did look at a few other systems such as HFS and Reiser4 but each had their minus points that put me off. And so I was left with NTFS, which seemed to be the best option with the equipment I had.

So the external drive was formatted and ready to go. I could now write to it and all was well.

My second decision was how to organise things while I was going through the process of conversion. I decided to put a folder next to my original music folder to store the originals but after I had processed them, to make it easier to distinguish files converted between conversion sessions (we all need a break eh!). This meant at the end of each session I could just move the files over and it would be easy to see where to start again when I came back.

I then made a folder for the converted files on the external hard disc to store these files in.

I used SoundConverter next setting it up to store the converted files in the root of the external drive. I did this so I could check for errors and multiple albums before storing them in the completed folder. SoundConverter has a bulk process option which is why I chose it.

I decided to use ogg as my format to convert to, so all my files would be the same. There are various qualities and formats so I didn't think it would make too much difference and FLAC would be overkill on most. If I was unhappy with the sound quality I could always go back and re-rip the CD's from my collection although this would not be possible with my own recordings from my friends bands gigs obviously.

Any faulty TAGS were altered in Quod Libet as this has a good tag editor or updated in Picard so the file names and tags were correct.

At one point I found a Bin and Cue file which was quickly converted using BinChunker to a set of Wav files which could then be converted and tagged.

So thats how its been working so far.

File and default application association

OK, today I've been messing with my music collection. I've decided to use "Quod Libet" as my music player. It's much simpler than "banshee" which has just too many options and other rubbish I won't use on it. Quod Libet is much simpler and has the options for any plugins I may want to add in the future..and my favourite thing about it is that is has a nice file viewer which is exactly how I like to choose my music (from the folder it is stored in).

Anyway I set everything up but found under menu / system settings / details / default applications I could not associate Quod Libet with the option to play all music files as the default player. It just was not there. it wasn't under "other applications" either.

After some searching of forums I found the process to add it. Apparently you need to associate the file type to the application, just as you would in Windows, but for some reason I have not discovered on my Linux learning curve Quod Libet is not showing as an application on the list.

So how to do it. Instead of using Nemo (the standard file manager) you need to use "Thunar" an alternative one (maybe a permission thing ?). Luckily I already had that installed so I navigated to it on the menu / system tools and there I opened a music file in the .ogg format, which is the type of music file I want Q L (lets call it that from now on) to play. From within the file manager view that listed the contents of the folder I was in I chose an .ogg file and right clicked on it to bring up the properties dialogue. Here it gave me the option to associate the file type with an application. Scrolling down, Q L was there. I associated it with the file by making sure the check mark was crossed and applied using the button for this. Easy, it associated the file system wide and now everytime I click on an Ogg Vorbis music file type Q L comes up to play it.

It even shows now as linked on the system details screen.

I've come across this situation with other file types and applications and now I have the answer !

Software manager not opening from Menu ?

Well I've had this problem for ages after I messed about with menu editing in order to create a new folder showing my Emulators.
Lots of searches later I finally found the issue. I'd had an inkling it was because the application needed to be called from root. I initially put "sudo makeinstall" as the call in the command text box after opening properties in edit menu (right click on the menu in the left hand corner).
This did not work. I finally found I was correct but the command was "gksu mintInstall".
Fixed !