id3fs Creates A Filesystem Of Your Music Which You Can Browse By ID3 Tags

If you have a lot of music that's proprely tagged but the directory structure is a mess, you can still browse it in a really smart way by using id3fs.

id3fs works with mp3, flac and ogg files and provides a browsable filesystem of your music files, organised into sub-directories by id3 tags (or flac/ogg comments).

Basically, this little command line tool will create symbolic links to your actual music which you can then browse by artist, audio type (mp3, flac, ogg), genre, year, decade, ratings and more. But not only that - you can also combine these as it supports operators such as "AND" and "OR". Example: Metal/AND/year/2005/OR/4-star.

Here is a screenshot to get a better idea on what id3fs actually does (although you must really try it to get the whole picture):

More folder structure examples:

goth/AND/decade/1980s/
postrock/AND/NOT/rating/terrible/
thrash/OR/rapmetal/AND/NOT/wears-a-red-hat/
prog/AND/decade/1970s/OR/psychedelia/AND/decade/1960s/
location/sweden/AND/screamo/AND/postrock

How to use id3fs

Using id3fs is very easy (firstly make sure you've installed id3fs - download link at the end of the post):

1. Create a folder somewhere on in your home directory - let's call it "tags".

2. id3fs will have to index all your music. To do this, run the following command:

id3fs-index /path/to/your/music

Where /path/to/your/music is... you got the idea.

3. Now you'll have to mount a view of your music in the folder created in step 1 (called "tags" in my example):

sudo id3fsd /path/to/your/music ~/tags

That's it. Now go to the ~/tags folder and you'll be able to browse your music based on the various criteria mentioned above.

Download id3fs .deb | More info and source files download