The early songbird eats the file structure!

October 22, 2009 4:42 PM

Songbird has completely destroyed my media file structures. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Windows XP SP3, 4.0GHz processor, 1GB ram, if it's relevant.

Pre-Songbird, I had a very nice, orderly directory called MP3, that contained all of my MP3, arranged thusly:

Artist/Album/Tracks

I decided to try Songbird, as it was working out well on my Mac at work, and it's completely destroyed the folder's order.

It seems to have spontaneously rewritten the whole thing as Whatever/Whatever/Some Tracks.

For instance, where I used to have

Gary Numan/Greatest Hits/Tracks 1-13

I now have

Gary Numan/Greatest Hits/Tracks 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13
Gary Numan/Greatest Hits/Tracks 4, 5, 7, 9, 12

Where I used to have

Various Artists/Wipeout XL Soundtrack/Tracks 1-13

I now have 13 separate folders by 13 separate artists, some duplicates, with individual tracks scattered all over the damn place.

I want to fix this, but with about 120 GB of music completely scattered to the four winds, I don't know how. Songbird, to add insult to injury, absolutely refuses to work on my system, throws up error messages, and won't play music at the best of times, so sticking with it is not an option.

All I want is my tidy file structure back, then to apologize to Foobar and never stray again. Help!

posted by Shepherd to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Are the tags intact? I would hope so. If so, get thee a copy of Media Monkey. It re"organize" your files in any way you like. (personally, I do [album artist]\album\track# - artist - track name.mp3....that way various artists can be the album artist and all my soundtracks are together.)
posted by notsnot at 4:58 PM on October 22, 2009

Best answer: I MoJo'd a bunch of my friends' music & discovered that since I did not have iTunes, all the files were named something like D798374F.mp3.

I NEARLY DIED.

Luckly, MusicBrainz Picard + MediaMonkey identified, tagged, and organized in files. I recommend the combination highly.
posted by opossumnus at 5:02 PM on October 22, 2009

Er, highly recommend combination. Grammar, etc.
posted by opossumnus at 5:04 PM on October 22, 2009

Response by poster: I'll give it a shot! Thanks!
posted by Shepherd at 5:35 AM on October 23, 2009

Best answer: Worst case scenario, install iTunes, import the music and tell it to keep your music organized. Everything gets dumped into Music/Artist/Album by default. Any duplication of Artist/Album (as described above for Gary Numan) likely means there's a difference in the actual track name somewhere (ie, an errant space or a misspelled word or etc. in some but not all of the tracks). For compliations, mark them as such.

Feel free to delete iTunes afterwards, but you can use any software to play back the music. iTunes won't care (but it also won't see new things added unless you tell it they are there). I let iTunes organize my music and fill my iPod, but I use Winamp or VLC for playback on Windows and Mac, respectively.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:04 PM on October 23, 2009