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Like most people I know I have a lot of mp3's and every person likes to sort theirs differently.

My preferred method of sorting my mp3's is to do it on the file system going artist -> album -> track, but I know some who do crazy stuff like genre -> sub-genre -> artist -> album -> track and worse!

The reason I like to have it sorted on the file system is that I can quickly copy a specific artist's album when I need it, and I don't like bloated mp3 managers like itunes or winamp for managing my collection.

Also like many other people I know, though I did my best to keep things organised I still had an unsorted folder of about 1000 tracks of all kinds of stuff, which I just didn't have time to sort out properly.

So I went looking for a tool to do this organisation for me. I found a couple tools that would do the job but I had to pay for them and as this is a relatively simple job I thought I'd hunt out a free one.

As it turns out there's not many tools that I could find easily to do this in the way I wanted until I came across MediaSort (http://mediasort.sourceforge.net/). This did exactly what I wanted examining the id3 tags of the mp3s in the unsorted folder and moving them into a series of folders arranged in the way I wanted.

The only problem with this tool is that it runs of Apache ant (http://ant.apache.org/) the setup of which on windows can be a right pain to work, and hence the reason for this post - a quick and easy guide to getting MediaSort running on Windows so you too can bring order to your mp3 collection. Incidentally media sort also arranges other file types too such as avi's and images in a similar way, and as such can be really useful for those of you with massive unsorted photo collections.
So what do you do to get it going?

1. First install the latest java development kit (jdk) for windows from Sun Microsystems (literally just download it and run the installer - version at the time of writing is 6 update 6): http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
2. Once this is installed go and grab this really, really handy Apache ant installer for windows from Google code, and, again just run the installer: http://code.google.com/p/winant/
3. Download the MediaSort code from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=169714&package_id=193585&release_id=510898
4. Extract the media sort archive and copy the contents of everything in the sub folders of the lib folder to your Apache ant lib folder (being careful to overwrite any files that already exist) on my machine the location of the Apache ant folder is: C:\Program Files\WinAnt\lib due to using the winant installer.
5. run the run.cmd file in the mediasort folder you just extracted and you should find that it fires up the interface
6. Set the source folder you want to arrange - in my case C:\MP3\Unsorted and mediasort will analyse the files for meta information (id3 tags from mp3s, filesystem data on the files, etc.)
7. Set the target folder you want the arranged mp3's to be copied or moved to - in my case C:\music\target
8. Click on items in the list of meta-data attributes that you want to use to define where you're copying or moving files to - in my case I chose the following pattern: [MP3 - author]/[MP3 - album]/[MP3 - title].mp3
9. Click copy or move and it will do that sorting the files to the pattern you specified - job done!

This worked great first time for me but there was room for a little improvement. Where some of the mp3's didn't have a full set of id3 tags MediaSort didn't know where to put the files and as such bundled then into folders called "unknown".

So I went hunting for another free tool to analyze the mp3s and populate all the id3 tags before running the sort again and second time round it worked flawlessly. For this part of the process I used Zortam Mp3 Media Studio 8.10 (http://www.zortam.com/) which did the job a treat.

So that's it.

One last thing to mention is if you followed my Red5 posts (http://www.coderchris.com/tag/red5/) then
you should be able to use winant to get that installed on windows too - I've not tried it yet, but it should work.

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