Is there an easy in Windows explorer to put all individual albums from an artist in a single folder and naming it after teat artist?
Create the folder and move the other folders.
We are talking about Windows, it is pretty basic. Unless you are talking having Picard do this, which was not mentioned in your post.
The way you are talking about doing it is how I am doing it but is a long process and still do not have even half of my library done.
Again, we are talking basic computering.
Highlight multiple items so that you can move them all at one time.
You could start looking into using Picard, it can name and move your files according to the tags.
It will take you some time to get into it and configure it correctly, but it could save you quite some time in the long run.
Just be sure to test it with a copy of only a few files (2 or 3 albums maybe) first. Don’t make the mistake to throw your entire collection at it, learn to use the tool first. You can find plenty of help here if you get stuck.
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So does Windows Media Player, and I believe iTunes.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I didn’t know you could use Picard to move multiple folders into the main folder. I have been using it to tag files.
A page from the manual for you:
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/options/#file_naming
Picard has the ability to change the file and folder names at the same time as updating the tagging. This would be how it can reorganise your files for you into the folder structure you require.
As noted above - do tests on small number of albums\artists first. Make sure it works as you want before pointing at a large collection.
It is also a good idea to move the music in batches as throwing hundreds of albums at Picard in one go will choke it. It will stall and look like nothing is happening - may even grey out the application - but it usually is still working hard in the background. Just walk away and get a beer\cup of tea while waiting
Personally if I was going to use Picard to do this rearranging I’d be handing it only a few dozen albums at a time so I can check on progress better.
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My main advice is to slowly work carefully through those options with a few test albums. Once you are confident it is doing as you require, then expand to pointing at bigger groups of files.
As someone mentioned above - once the tagging is in place and there are MBIDs in the files then Picard can do a great job of reorganising file and folder names.
Do watch out for little oddities though. Like if you have other files in those folders alongside the music - these will not always be moved.
The foobar2000 player also handles moving files around based on tags. If your music is already tagged, it’s fairly quick as well - it certainly doesn’t choke on large file sets either.
Plenty of other tools allow for the same thing.
I tried foobar2000 once but will try it again and compare the 2. Thanks
Yea slow of coure. I hope if I get the hang of it that it is faster than doing it the old-fashioned way.
Picard seems like it will be great but i would have to go through and retag and move my whole library. I have moved some stuff. How do you move things around it foobar?
Throw files in it, right-click and select move files. Then write a pattern (similar to how you write it in Picard); for example, “%album artist”%album%[%discnumber%.]%tracknumber% - %title%”
@thedeadinme By “do it slow” I meant to be patient with testing and selecting options and make sure the files are changing as you require. Picard is very powerful underneath, so it is also easy to make mistakes.
Once you have the settings to your liking, then you can point at bigger and bigger groups of files to be moved. You certainly don’t need to confusing things by swapping to foobar2000 to do the same thing.
Its worth noting that if you do put a series of albums by one artist into a single folder as a list of songs you may be causing problems for yourself. Although the metadata may have the album field set most music players/taggers/servers do tend to expect songs to be organized one folder per album so this could have unforseen circumstances.
IMO opinion the only time that is a good plan is when you really dont care about albums, only songs, is this the situation here ?
I am not sure I understand what you are saying. I do use winamp and haven’t run into problems. Are you talking about the process of tagging and putting the albums in a single folder?
Im simply saying that various tools expect/prefer to songs to be organized one album per folder. Winamp does not have an issue so thats fine if that is all you use, but I cant see how moving the files helps Winamp either so why do you want to put them in one folder per artist ?