Last week I released mussort version 0.2. This release is a huge update from version 0.1 that I released back in early 2008.

mussort is a simple command-line music sorting program. It recursively processes a directory tree, and then sorts whatever music files it finds there, renaming the files and putting them in a nice directory tree.

0.2 added a load of features designed to make mussort faster. It introduced optional caching of file tags, which has a major impact on the performance on subsequent runs on a directory tree. I optimized away an insane amount of readdir() calls that it kept doing over and over, even though nothing had actually changed since the last readdir(). It also only supported id3info and ogginfo as sources for information, which is problematic because ogginfo is very very slow at times. So in 0.2 it can use the Audio::File perl module if it is available. It provides redundancy (should Audio::File fail for an ogg file, it falls back to ogginfo, should id3info fail for an mp3 file it tries Audio::File) and a large speed increase for ogg vorbis files. It can also use id3v2 if it is available. Because of the caching however, even without Audio::File, any subsequent runs on ogg vorbis files will be a lot faster.

When it comes to actual features, the largest one is support for detection of compilation albums. It will locate an album that contains a lot of different artists and then put those into a single directory named after the album, rather than put them into separate artist/album dirs. For those that don’t want that, it is important to note that the feature is optional and must be explicitly requested (like case-insensitive sorting).

Other than that there’s a bunch of code cleanups, along with minor additions, such as selectable verbosity (–verbose, –quiet) and the option to keep all duplicate files around (–keepdupes). mussort is also now hosted on github, so if you are interested, fork the repository and let’s see what cool stuff you can come up with! Remember to prod me with a pull request so that any nice things you do get included upstream.