Ultimate Music Organisation Rule

Hi gang

I'm having trouble creating a rule and it's driving me a bit mad.

I have a Mac Mini server attached to an external thunderbolt drive. I want it so that when I add new music to the server I set it's colour label top green and that sends it to a folder on the external HDD. Then the problems start, what I want to happen is to have Hazel look at the files and then move it into subfolders based on Artist and album, but more often than not it goes wrong. Sometime Hazel can't read the contents of the file (sometimes I have FLAC audio files) or Hazel organises the files, but not all of them.

I tried to get around this by keeping them on a separate folder on the external HDD for about 15 minutes to let spotlight have a look at them, but I'm not sure I have made that rule correctly.

Finally, if I have an album where the Artist has a lot of features then Hazel makes a separate folder for each track so it would be great to Hazel see the Album Artist instead. It would finally be good to have a rule based on the Album Artist as I have many albums from a certain record label and file them differently to other albums.

I know I seem to be asking a lot but this is really the biggest thing I would like Hazel to do and I can't seem to manage it at the moment. I sure it can be done though.

Thanks in advance.

Concerning album artist, you'll have to look at the available Spotlight attributes and see if there's an entry for that. Hazel doesn't control that so if it isn't there, you'll have to use some sort of script/program to extract that info.

As for the inconsistent behavior, it could be that Spotlight is lagging behind when new files appear on the external drive. Adding a delay would help in that case.

Hello there.

Thanks for getting back to me. I'm pretty bad at scripting (one of the main reasons why I got Hazel to be honest).

Are you saying that there is a different app I can get that would be able to extract the information I want?

There are commandline programs which can extract various metadata. Search the forums here as it may be the case that someone has already made a script that uses one of them.

Hi there.

I thought of another way of doing this and I wanted your thoughts.

I have a renamer to change the name of the file to something like "02. Track --Artist--Album--.mp3"

Then I could send it to the sorting folder and then could Hazel look at the file name and move it to the right Artist and Album folder (and perhaps remove the --Artist--Album-- bits at the end of the file name?).

What do you think to that?

That should work using match patterns (look it up in the help if you don't know what they are). This assumes you are putting the album artist in the name.

The solutions I think I like is creating a little applet with A Better Finder Renamer, then having Hazel move the files based on those file names. Then I want to make a rule to rename the files back to something nice at the other end (01. Track) for example after a day or so, to give spotlight a chance to get to know the file.

How would I get Hazel to look through all the folders and get the music file to do the rename?

Cheers

Not sure if it is necessary to wait. Spotlight metadata is not dependent on the name of the file so you should be able to do the rename after the move.

I am just a noob (downloaded the demo 2h ago) but i have about the same needs, to organise my music properly. The problem is the FLAC files which even if they have the proper metadata it’s not read by OS built-in tools. For example if you “get info” a FLAC you don’t get any metadata info. The easiest solution is to convert the FlAC to ALAC (Apple lossless variant) with a program like XLD, keeping the metadata and then it will be read up by the system an Hazel.

Hi mate. Welcome to the forum and thanks for the suggestion. I will do some experiments with that. I use VOX to play and store my lossless music and I haven’t tried the new Apple formate yet. Is there much difference in size?

AdamRoxby wrote:Hi mate. Welcome to the forum and thanks for the suggestion. I will do some experiments with that. I use VOX to play and store my lossless music and I haven’t tried the new Apple formate yet. Is there much difference in size?

Not really, they have the same goal, to losslesly compress music, so the size is around the same. If you don’t mind converting the music to a “proprietary” format versus “open”, on a Mac ALAC works better being more integrated in the OS and also being compatible by default with all the eco system including IOS devices.

Well 'Permute' didn't like being asked to convert a flac. Will have to try a different app.

AdamRoxby wrote:Well 'Permute' didn't like being asked to convert a flac. Will have to try a different app.

I use XLD (http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html). Also, it can keep metadata or add metadata if the files dont have it.

felix.v wrote:
AdamRoxby wrote:Well 'Permute' didn't like being asked to convert a flac. Will have to try a different app.

I use XLD (http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html). Also, it can keep metadata or add metadata if the files dont have it.

Hello mate, that app did the trick. That's for the help.

Im glad it worked up.