Appellation - Smart rename utility for your music (Core Python)

Haven’t you always wished that your music was well organized but were too lazy to do it yourself. Here is an app that addresses the first step towards organizing your music collection viz. “Nomenclature”. Personally, I have always preferred my music files to be saved on disk in “<artist name>-<song title>” format.

Recently I had written a post on extracting ID3 tags from music files (read it here). I decided to extend that module and create an application which could be used to rename all my music files in the format mentioned above. The application would simply accept the path of destination directory and recursively search it for music files. If the ID3 tags present in the file are the latest version, the renaming process would occur without much difficulty. However, if the version of ID3 tags is very old, the process might not occur, leaving the filename unaltered. Another case of failure is when the artist information is not present in the file (No frame id TPE1 found… the app won’t look for anything else as the performer name!)

I was too lazy to create a GUI… so you are most likely to see a console when you run this app. But fear not, there is little you have to do. Simply copy and paste the path of the destination directory into the console and press enter. The progress of the entire operation is displayed on the console itself.

You can download the application from my projects page (click here). Look for a file “appellation.rar”. Simply extract the files into a folder and run the launcher script “run.py” using python.

The app is open source, so feel free to browse through the meagre amount of code. Perhaps if you feel like extending the app, you can drop me a line. Someone please make a UI if possible. I’m too bummed out with GUI for the moment to make this any better than its current (and ugly) form :)

I ran this on my collection and got pretty decent results. The summary towards the end of the program displayed a sum total of 20 files (out of 16 GiB of music) that had failed. Hopefully you have similar or better results.