Most media players are capable of organizing your music by artist and album, by reading the relevant information from the meta tag such as ID3 on MP3 files. The actual files on your hard drive often remain untouched. So even though you may appear to have a neat library when viewed through your media player, from Windows explorer your collection could be a complete mess.
Physically organizing your music files into folders and subfolders based on artist and album or genre, allows for easier searching and locating files without relying on your media player. Mp3 Folder Structure Maker is a software that helps you to do that.
Launch the application and add folders or individual files. The program parses sub folders, so you can pick the root folder or the drive partition and wait till the program finishes loading all MP3 files. As suggested by the name, the program can only list MP3 files. This could a problem for users who have their music in different formats, particularly when lossless formats like FLAC is becoming popular.
Once the program finishes scanning, files are then listed by Artist name, Title, Album and File name.
You can now define the folder structure by using variable names. The following variables are supported:
%original% – the original file name
%artist% – the name of the artist
%title% – the title of the song
%album% – the name of the album
%firstletter% – the first letter of the artist
%year% – the year of release
%genre% – the genre of the album
You can define the structure as, for example, %artist%\%album%. This will copy all MP3 files by a particular artist or band into one folder with subfolders for individual albums. While copying it is possible to rename the files by song title, or artist name for instance.
By default, the program copies files into the new folders. If you want to move them permanently check the option “Delete input files after successful transfer”.
Since the program relies entirely on ID3 tags of the MP3 files to organize the collection, files with missing tags will not be copies or moved. To help you identify songs with missing tags, the program lets you list bad tagged files in your collection. It is then possible to edit ID3 tags from within the program before starting the operation.
Mp3 Folder Structure Maker has not been updated since 2007, but works fine on all versions of Windows starting from Windows 98 to 7.
You mentioned that this program could be useless for those of us with mixed file types (mp3, aac, etc.)? Agreed. Can you provide a suggested alternative?
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