id3fs Creates A Filesystem Of Your Music Which You Can Browse By ID3 Tags

If you have a lot of music that's proprely tagged but the directory structure is a mess, you can still browse it in a really smart way by using id3fs.

id3fs works with mp3, flac and ogg files and provides a browsable filesystem of your music files, organised into sub-directories by id3 tags (or flac/ogg comments).

Basically, this little command line tool will create symbolic links to your actual music which you can then browse by artist, audio type (mp3, flac, ogg), genre, year, decade, ratings and more. But not only that - you can also combine these as it supports operators such as "AND" and "OR". Example: Metal/AND/year/2005/OR/4-star.

Here is a screenshot to get a better idea on what id3fs actually does (although you must really try it to get the whole picture):

More folder structure examples:

goth/AND/decade/1980s/
postrock/AND/NOT/rating/terrible/
thrash/OR/rapmetal/AND/NOT/wears-a-red-hat/
prog/AND/decade/1970s/OR/psychedelia/AND/decade/1960s/
location/sweden/AND/screamo/AND/postrock

How to use id3fs

Using id3fs is very easy (firstly make sure you've installed id3fs - download link at the end of the post):

1. Create a folder somewhere on in your home directory - let's call it "tags".

2. id3fs will have to index all your music. To do this, run the following command:

id3fs-index /path/to/your/music

Where /path/to/your/music is... you got the idea.

3. Now you'll have to mount a view of your music in the folder created in step 1 (called "tags" in my example):

sudo id3fsd /path/to/your/music ~/tags

That's it. Now go to the ~/tags folder and you'll be able to browse your music based on the various criteria mentioned above.

Download id3fs .deb | More info and source files download

'Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer' Updated With Command Line Version

A while back we've posted about a script called "Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer" that helps you keep various folders clean (such as your Desktop) by automatically moving the files by extension into folders such as Pictures, Documents and so on.

If you remember, I've mentioned it would be nice if it had a command line version so you could automatically run it at startup or in a cron job. Well, an update today brings a command line version of the Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer script.

To use, download the script, extract it and open "cmd_cleaner" and starting with line 28 of the script you should see something like this:

picdir="/home/$USER/Pictures"
musicdir="/home/$USER/Music"
docdir="/home/$USER/Documents"
videodir="/home/$USER/Videos"
archdir="/home/$USER/Archives"
progdir="/home/$USER/Scripts"

These are the folders where your files will be moved upon cleaning - change them to whatever you want (or leave them as they are). Then make the script executable:

chmod +x /path/to/cmd_cleaner

Then, to clean a folder, use:

/path/to/cmd_cleaner a /home/andrei/Desktop

Of course, change /home/andrei/Desktop in the command above with the path to the folder you want to clean (I've used an exact path because I'm not sure if relative paths / variables work in Cron). "a" stands for advanced cleaning and "s" for simple (so you can replace "a" in the above command with "s") - we've already explained what these do in the previous post.


Now you're ready to add it to a cron job (for a GUI you can use Gnome Schedule) or to your startup applications (System > Preferences > Startup applications - simply add the command like I've explained above).


Note: if you get a bunch of errors when running the script, don't worry about it, the script works but the errors are displayed because it checks multiple times (so this is only a display error which will be fixed soon). The author explanation:

The cleaning is working without problem, the error are the second checking result, when the document is already moved. The same is also in the classic cleaner. I will look at this later and will to rewrite it for output without errors.

Download Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer

Keep Your Desktop Clean With Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer

In my search for a clean Desktop (because I got tired of cleaning it manually), I came across "Directory cleaner and files organizer", a script (with Zenity for a GUI) that automatically cleans any directory (and thus the Desktop folder) by moving the files to various folders such as all the pictures into ~/Pictures, the archives into ~/Archives, documents into ~/Documents and so on.

The script recognizes more than 470 extensions and the directories where it moves the files can be customized in the settings. Also, I'm using it for organizing my Desktop but you can use it for any other folder such as the ~/Downloads folder and so on.

Directory cleaner and files organizer has 2 options for cleaning: "Start-Cleaning" which moves all the files in the selected directory to the directories you've set in its settings, overwriting any existing files, and "Advanced-Cleaning" which is a smart way of moving the files:

• if the file that's going to be moved already exists in the destination folder, a new folder with its extension is created and the file is moved into that folder.
• if that folder also has a file with the same name, the file is renamed using the date and time so the file never gets overwritten

Installation

Before proceeding with the installation, remember to always check the source of any script you run on your computer!

Directory cleaner and files organizer only depends on Zenity which should already be installed. To install Directory cleaner and files organizer, download if from HERE, extract it and double click the "install.sh" file.

Once installed you can find it under Accessories > Files-Oraganizer.

Configuring Directory cleaner and files organizer

Directory cleaner and files organizer clean paths can be configured. By default, selecting "Edit-Settings" will pop up the following configuration:

Edit path's for your files with exact order
-----------------------------------------------------
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Pictures
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Music
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Documents
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Videos
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Archives
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Scripts

You can get an idea on what each folder is for (therefore I won't get into detail here since it's obvious), so you can easily modify it to point to some other location.

Directory cleaner and files organizer is not 100% automated as you have to run it and select the folder you want it to clean. But if you know a bit of Bash, you can always tweak it so you can launch it via command line (without Zenity) and then add it to an hourly cron job.