Rating: 5 

Version tested:  2.2

Description: Id3ToFolder is a powerful program that enables you to change or rebuild the folder structure of your mp3 collection based on their tag information.

Your digital music collection has grown and grown over the years. Let’s say that initially you were putting all folders in the same place, adopting the naming convention “artistname - albumname”, and now after all this time you are wishing you organized them differently. Or conversley, let’s say that you were using a ripping software that was creating a foldername for each artist, with all the folders for the different albums placed inside, and now you would like your music organized some other way. Or let’s say that all of your music has somehow ended up in one big folder, with no organization whatsover, and you’re wishing there was a way to organize all of it into folders without having to do it manually.

For all of the above scenarios, Id3ToFolder is a practical and powerful solution that can reorganize huge libraries efficiently in one fell swoop. You have to be sure that your files contain correct tagging information though, as this is what Id3ToFolder works with. I recommend you use Mp3Tag or some other tagging software to fix your tags, if needed, before you use Id3ToFolder. (N.b. Mp3Tag can work with all of your music at once; it will recursively scan your music from the main folder location all the way down). You only need to have the tagging info that you will use in your folder structures (i.e. if you are not going to use genres in your structures, you don’t need to worry about whether these are defined or not in your tags).

Id3ToFolder allows you to define the following folder structures:

• Main folder: Artist. Subfolder: Album or Year.
• Main folder: Album. No Subfolder.
• Main folder: Genre. Subfolder: Album or Year.
• Main folder: Year. Subfolder: Album or Year.

For the album folders, Id3ToFolder will let you define your desired naming convention as any combination of the artist, album, and year variables (see screenshot). As for the audio files themselves, renaming them is optional, but Id3ToFolder can do it for you as well. If you are going to rename the mp3’s Id3ToFolder offers the usual combination of options (artist, album, title, track#, genre, year, bitrate and even comment).

I personally would recommend to keep the folder structure as simple as possible, but if you want a structure with more than 2 layers, you can always re-run Id3ToFolder for each one of your first level folders. Let’s say, for example, that you created six main ‘genre’ folders as your first level in your folder structure, but now you would like to create a more complicated artist/album structures within each one of the six folders, you can do that easily by running Id3ToFolder six times within each one of your main folders.

I recently used Id3ToFolder to help a coworker rebuild his folder structure after a lot of files ended up in the same place; it did a beautiful job and it did it quickly. Overall a highly recommended program.

Go to the developer’s download page for the latest version (scroll to about the middle for the download link).