Using Void to manage my music collection

[oxblood]

Hi, total noob here. Maybe this is something that can be done inside win10 shell, but so far no avail.
I have all my music on a drive, with each subfolder an artist, and the subfolders are their albums, e.g. "m:\music\mp3\<artist>\<album>"

Usually I can just grab my newest albums by sorting the "mp3" folder by date modified. In the last month I've batch-added cover art to each album, now each artist/album folder will have a "Folder" .png or .jpg

Unfortunately, this has totally biffed my top level sorting by (as old folders had cover art injected). Is there a way to have a detailed search filter that will sort by date modified, but ignore those folders modified by any file other than .flac ?

Thanks in advance, cheers!

(I've attached an extremely clunky, inelegant solution. Ideally I would only see the top level "M:\music\mp3\"

[froggie]

The short answer is no. There is no good way of telling what changed the date of a directory entry. Even if you figured out some way to correlate the changes and this date change, it would be unstable - other things might change the date in the future.

It is just not the way to do it. Everything is wonderful and I use it multiple times a day, but not to manage my music collection. (Although I do use it to find and play specific songs)

Search for a "music collection manager" - there are both free and pay version out there. Read up about them and about MP3 tags and ID3 and FLAC data (both are somewhat supported by Everything, but not enough to use as your collection manager). You will end up with much more powerful tools that should make managing your music much easier.

[oxblood]

Thanks for the quick reply. That's unfortunate. I wasn't using it for a media manager, just to take latest albums onto my phone. Foobar with foo_facets seems to do the trick though, cheers.

[NotNull]

@froggie is right: there are a lot of events that can cause the date of the folder to change.
But if it has worked for you so far, here are a few things that you could do:

[1] Wait 3 months; after that, you can use your current method (or use queries like dm: last2days,dm:last1weeks to get the newest ones since your folder.jpg action)

[2] - In Everything, query: ext:flac "M:\music\mp3\" dm:last3months
- export this as an EFU (example: TEST.EFU)
- Open TEST.EFU in Everything
- Query: depth:4
(This will give you all albums with FLAC's in it that were modified in the last 3 months)
- When you are done, close the filelist (Menu:File > Close File List) to get your " normal" Everything back.

[3] Write a script that changes the (modified) date of the folder to that of the most recent FLAC in that folder. Powershell can do that, for example.


If things are back to "business as usual", you can query "M:\music\mp3\" dm:last3months depth:4 to get a list of the new albums.


Off-topic:

In the last month I've batch-added cover art to each album

How did you do that??
In a previous millennium I wrote a script that parsed a website for that. I think it was WallMart (but might also been Amazon), because they had the most albums and in a very structured way. But nevertheless, it was hit or miss ("thanks" to all the remaster, deluxe, expanded,etc versions).

[therube]

(Just a brief read & not totally sure what you're wanting but...)


Nirsoft: FolderTimeUpdate "is a simple tool for Windows that scans all files and folders under the base folder you choose, and updates the 'Modified Time' of every folder according the latest modified time of the files stored in it."

With that you can change a folders date to that of "last modified" of its contents.

If your cover art is dated more recent, & so messes up those "last modified folder" dates, & assuming the dates of the png/jpg are not (particularly) meaningful, change the dates of the png/jpg to some earlier date (or set date, say to 1-1-1980 [actually you might want something a bit more recent]).

Then use FolderTimeUpdate to then set the directory dates to the last modified date - which would at that point, be the last modified date of your your mp3/flac files, & your directories should then be back in "order".


(You can use Everything to find your png/jpg files of interest.
Any number of decent "renamers" are out that that you can use to change the dates with.
Generally, drag them from Everything into the renamer.
Even Nirsoft's, BulkFileChanger should be able to do it.)

[oxblood]

Off-topic:

In the last month I've batch-added cover art to each album

How did you do that??
In a previous millennium I wrote a script that parsed a website for that. I think it was WallMart (but might also been Amazon), because they had the most albums and in a very structured way. But nevertheless, it was hit or miss ("thanks" to all the remaster, deluxe, expanded,etc versions).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/

It's a pretty simple tool, but runs your queries through many search engines, and it's all automated. For instance I had it set to only search for the front cover, and with a max width of 500px. I suggest doing a test run with a few albums, then once you have everything as you like, you can set it to 'automatically download and add to folder' and leave it on overnight.

@therube

Looks promising! I will check it out after work, thanks. are there examples of "[3] Write a script that changes the (modified) date.." that I can check out?

[NotNull]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/

It's a pretty simple tool, but runs your queries through many search engines, and it's all automated. For instance I had it set to only search for the front cover, and with a max width of 500px. I suggest doing a test run with a few albums, then once you have everything as you like, you can set it to 'automatically download and add to folder' and leave it on overnight.

Thanks !!!

Looks promising! I will check it out after work, thanks. are there examples of "[3] Write a script that changes the (modified) date.." that I can check out?

It *IS* promising! That's a perfect alternative for my nr. [3] suggestion. Forget the scripts!
Even better: in the current version of FolderTimeUpdate, you can blacklist or whitelist files that can influence the new folder date.
So including only *.FLAC will result in only folders containing FLAC's will get a new date (based on FLAC date))
(no longer a need to manipulate the folder.jpg files)

@therube: Thanks for that! Yet another NirSoft utility for my Tools collection