Taming Your Music Collection: File Structure

     Some day—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life—you will have an extensive music collection that you want to organize. The task is arduous and time-consuming if done manually. It will eat away at your evenings and weekends, and might even keep you awake at night as your thoughts are tormented by the underscores and extra dashes that pop up in your music player. Not to worry, we are going to organize your entire music collection to your exact specifications through the magic of software!
     This article will be the first in a series of software articles describing the process of organizing your music collection. I’ve decided to write the application in Python for a number of reasons: I’ve never used Python myself, Python has modules for reading and writing mp3 tags, and Python is easy to install and configure.

Taming Your Music Collection: File Structure - Flowchart



Purpose & Overview Of This Project
     The goal of this tutorial will be to automatically open any number of mp3 files, read their id3 tag data, and save each file according to a predefined pattern. We will first devise a plan to accomplish our goals and, after preparing our system for development in Python, we’ll put our plan into action and make sure it works. By the end of the tutorial, you should be able to organize your mp3 collection into the file structure you desire, provided the metadata exists to rename each file.
     This tutorial is not meant to teach you Python or programming paradigms, but rather demonstrate how learning to write software can enhance your life by giving you the ability to automate your tasks and free up your time for more important endeavors, such as raptor-proofing your home.