Perfect Music Organisation

Oh dear.

I had a look at 3 random songs and found this ...

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s14/sh/45e2c6cb-ddb4-426f-ae4a-491e62b1e63d/2666bf87ae83fd60b234a57d2dd91e45

I dont suppose you can recommend a good tagger for MP3's that will embed this stuff.

Well this is strange, I have tried a lot of free solutions and all of them can see that there is name, album and other information in the file so im not sure why Hazel can't read it.

I wonder if it is to do with Spotlight not indexing the file? It is contained on a Time Capsule, do you think that would make a difference?

I'm now wondering whether I should e-mail this as a potential bug because I have gone through a number of programs, all of which have identified the correct meta data in the music files. So does seem clear that the information is embedded in the MP3 files so it seems to be a case of Hazel not being able to extrapolate it. I'm not sure whether this is because of the system uses or, as I said previously, that spotlight is having some trouble indexing the files. I just don't know enough about it to be able to answer that.

What do you think?

Hazel needs to use Spotlight to get at the data so having other programs that are intended to read ID3 tags directly doesn't say anything.

If the data is not in "More Info" in Finder, then Hazel probably won't be able to see it either. If you are comfortable using the commandline, you can try forcing Spotlight to index those files using 'mdimport' and using 'mdls' to check things afterwards.

I see the problem. I copied the file onto my desktop and all the information is there.

Im not shy about the command line but your info doesn't make sense to me. I am doing some searching but do you think you shine a little more light on the issue for me.

You have my thanks.

I think I have a way around if I'm unable to index the Time Capsule. I want this rule to really serve to purposes. The first tidy up all of the rubbish organisation I have been doing up until this point and to ensure that any new music I buy and download will be in the format I want. So couldn't I just copy it over onto my hard drive and run the rules from there and then copy it over to the TC.

Of course there would have to be some clever stuff to make sure that the folders merge when I get more Albums from artists I already own.

How does that sound?

you can prevent your rule from doing odd things to files with incomplete metadata by adding

Authors is not blank
Year recorded is not blank
Album is not blank

to the conditions.

For the commandline stuff, use "man <command>" to see how to use them.

The Sort into Subfolders action will use existing folders so there shouldn't be a problem with merging stuff.

Ok, so I think the solution is that I have the songs on my HDD and run the rule there before sending it to the Time Capsule. If I run the rule on the to sub divide the files hen how do I make Hazel move the root folder?

Not sure if that is a good solution since (a) you are making it more complicated by adding an extra step to move the folder and (b) if you move the folder, it can't merge them (this only occurs with the sort into subfolder action). I think the better solution is to enable Spotlight for the folder on your Time Capsule.

If you insist on going this route, I think you'd need to have separate rules to go into every folder and find the files and then move them, then sort into subfolders at the destination, using the "source folder" attribute. You'd also need to add a rule to remove empty folders.

I would agree that the best option would be to have the rule running on the destination folder but despite my best efforts I just can't seem to find a way to get spotlight to index the contents of the Time Capsule. Perhaps because it is not originally intended to be a network attached storage drive that makes it more difficult for it to be indexed. I'm sure I'm not the only person with this issue. Shame really.