On my linux server I had a directory of unsorted music files. I like my music to be organised by folders, for example:

%artist%\%album%\*.mp3 – Death\Scream Bloody Gore\

So I began writing a simple C++ program to read the artist and album tags from the files, create and move the files into the correct structure.

This is a relatively simple task and I know C++ is not the best choice of language but I thought I would continue and see how the development of C++ within Linux would fair. Mainly from a libraries point of view and an IDE.

Trying to find an IDE which would do code auto completion was a task which proved difficult. KDevelop seemed bloated and unusable. I settled on using a simple code editor called codeblocks. Simple, effective and easy to use.

Next task was to either write a library to read tags from the files or find a suitable library.

http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html

Was my choice, a simple generic interface for multiple music files. Quite nice.

So I set about writing the file, here are my results:

mp3_sorter.zip

The archive contains 3 files, the .cpp file, a simple Readme file and an sh build command.

To build the mp3_sorter.cpp might require you to change the include paths at the top of the file.

Below is the command used to build, note the taglib-config part, it automatically adds the includes and linker options for taglib.

g++ mp3_sorter.cpp -Wno-deprecated `taglib-config –cflags –libs` -o mp3_sorter