Moving/Renaming Music Files

[Guest]

Hi, I'm new to Kubuntu, I copied over my music collection in iTunes to an external hard drive and after installing Kubuntu I moved the iTunes collection into a folder named Music under /home. Problem is iTunes sorts the music by directory "My Documents/My Music/iTunes/Artist/Album/song files" and now under Kubuntu its "/home/Music/Artist/Album/song files" and I would now like to make it "/home/Music/song files".

I'm sure there's a pretty simple terminal commend to do this, there's just one problem, I have songs with the same name under different albums, so I would need to attach the Artist's name and Album to the beginning of the music file names.

I have just under 200 GB's in music so if someone could help me out here, that would be great.

Thank you,
Austin

P.S. I'm using Kubuntu 7.10, 64 bit if that matters at all.

[jankushka]

Re: Moving/Renaming Music Files

you'll need to place the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash

exec > /tmp/renaming.out 2> /dev/null

START_DIR=/home/Music

cd $START_DIR

# loop on the artists
#
ls | while read artist
do
 echo "the current artist is...${artist}"

 # loop on the current artist albums
 #
 cd "$artist"
 ls | while read album
 do
  echo "  the current album name is....${album}"
  echo "  the new album name will be...${artist}_-_${album}"

  # loop on the current album songs
  #
  cd "$album"
  ls | while read song
  do
   echo "    the current song name is....${song}"
   echo "    the new song name will be...${artist}_-_${album}_-_${song}"
   #mv "${song}" "${artist}_-_${album}_-_${song}"
  done

  # go up one level
  cd ..
 done

 # go up one level
 cd ..
done

in a file in your home directory, give it a name and do the following:

chmod 750 <filename>
./<filename>

now...
this script doesn't do anything...yet!
the actual rename (mv) command is commented out.

what this script does now is pretend to do the work.
and it will place an output file called renaming.out in /tmp.
so that you can check that your song files will be renamed correctly.

you can then run the script with the actual rename command
once you've inspected the output file a you're reasonably sure
nothing will be messed up...

hth

[jankushka]

Re: Moving/Renaming Music Files

oh...
and do a backup before you do anything!

[Guest]

Re: Moving/Renaming Music Files

Thank you so much!!!

I still have everything on the external hard drive so no harm done if it screws something up.

Austin


Edit:
It seems to almost work. There is one problem though, it's running in every directory that's in /home.

[jankushka]

Re: Moving/Renaming Music Files

mmm...
it shouldn't.
it should start in /home/Music (got it from your original post) and work recursively from there.
cfr:

START_DIR=/home/Music
cd $START_DIR

.
if this isn't correct, then just replace the value of START_DIR with the actual one in the script.
save it and run it again.

or there could be some symbolic link in the music directories hierarchy that makes the script jump out.
it doesn't make much sense, but you never know...

check the above first.
we can then look into this second option later.