Album Lister (uses ID3 tags)

• A simple script to output a list of albums in a given directory or volume.

• Albums ordered alphabetically by artist and then by album title

• Albums are grouped by genre

• Compilations are listed as "Various Artists"

• List is printed to console and also written to a file at the given location.

Usage

album_lister <path_to_disc_or_directory> <path_to_output_directory>

This gives you output like this:

DOWNTEMPO
Air: Talkie Walkie
Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children
Boards of Canada: The Campfire Headphase
Bonobo: Dial M for Monkey
Cinérex: Exit All Areas (Part 2)
Curly Top: Dubmission: More Bass Than Space
Hird: Moving on
Howie B: Music for Babies
Howie B: Snatch
Various Artists: Another Late Night (Kid Loco)
Various Artists: Another Late Night (Mixed by Fila Brazilia) [Uk]
Various Artists: Late Night Tales (Four Tet)
Various Artists: Thievery Corporation: Abductions and Reconstructions
Zero 7: Simple Things

ROCK & POP
Bjork: Post
Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen
Múm: Finally We Are No One
Múm: Summer Make Good
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
Rodrigo Y Gabriela: Rodrigo Y Gabriela
Various Artists: Adrian Sherwood Remixes
Vincent Gallo: When

Prerequisites

The script uses the artist, track title, album and genre information from the ID3 tags in the files which are found. Prerequisites are:

1. id3lib-ruby (gem install id3lib-ruby)

2. the underlying id3lib library in C:

   Debian

   Install libid3-dev and be sure to have ruby1.8-dev installed, otherwise you won‘t be able to build Ruby extensions.

      sudo aptitude install libid3-dev
   

   Gentoo

      sudo emerge -n id3lib
   

   OS X with Fink

   Install id3lib4-dev:

      sudo apt-get install id3lib4-dev
   

   Fink puts the library and header files in /sw. In order to enable the id3lib-ruby install program to find them, do:

      export CONFIGURE_ARGS="--with-opt-dir=/sw"
   

   Manual compilation

    Download, compile and install id3lib. When installing in /usr/local, you have to set CONFIGURE_ARGS:
   
      export CONFIGURE_ARGS="--with-opt-dir=/usr/local"
   

3. ActiveSupport from Rails. I lazily used this for the grouping.

Notes

Some characters are not represented correctly causing spacing issues. Perhaps switching to Ruby 1.9 will fix this? Patches welcome.

License

Do what you like.