Merge several MP3 folders into one well-organized folder

[xubuntu84]

I've googled and searched these threads with no luck on what I am trying to accomplish.

I have 3 folders of music, spread out between computers, that I would like to merge into one folder on my Ubuntu media server from which I can stream later.

My problem is that when I copy the music files over to the server, I am creating a lot of duplicates. What is the best method to copy these folders at about 30 GB each into one that is organized by a media player on the server? I am not partial to Banshee or Rhythmbox, but it seems I need some sort of software that will read the mp3 tags and put the music in folders by Artist/Album, only if that song does not already exist.

This seems like a rather straight-forward task, but I am having no luck with it. Any help is much appreciated!

[papibe]

That is not a trivial task.

This is what I think I've learned doing a similar task:

• Although it sounds very appealing to design and sort your music in a structured directory tree, for the most part the you will be fine with the player's own sort (using ID3 tags).
• Classical music could be the exception.
• Then, in general, it is more important to have the correct tags, than a good directory tree.
• There are two cases of duplicate songs:
  
  • Same content, but different 'rips' (the files are different).
  • The file are identical (even if the have different names).
• For identical files, you can relatively easy eliminate duplicates. You would need to write a script that:
  
  • Determine every song sum (using any sum command line tool, like md5sum).
  • Sort that list.
  • Then delete files with duplicate sums.

I hope that helps.
Regards.

[xubuntu84]

Thanks for your response, and I will look in to using the checksum to find identical files within the directory structure; I had not thought about that approach yet.

What about adding new songs to Banshee? I can't seem to find a feature that will allow you to remove duplicates within that program. One would think that under the Tools menu there would be a "remove duplicates" option. I hate to bring up other OSs, but iTunes does this quite nicely. Like I said, if I had to switch from using Banshee to something else I would not mind (so far I've attempted Rhythmbox and Songbird).

[rubylaser]

This looks to be a very good start for automating this with bash. It's tailored toward iTunes, but should work well with standard folder structures as well. Or, dupeGuru is another option. Here's a Youtube video of a guy demonstrating it's use.