So I still own and use a iPod. I use gtkpod to manage it. I ran into an issue though, that when I pull all my songs off the iPod with gtkpod, I get all the songs just dumped in my music folder with no organization at all. I like my songs in Album folders under Artist folders. There is a neat little trick that I thought I’d share on how to get it done.

I use the exif tool to extract the artist and album details from the songs and then loop through them to organize my tunes.

The first pass, I extract the artist and copy all the songs into folder based on the Artist tag.

exiftool -ext m4a '-Directory<$Directory/$Artist' -r .

Then I run the command again to pass over all the songs in each Artist folder and sort them into Albums

exiftool -ext m4a '-Directory<$Directory/$Album' -r .

This actually works as long as the files are properly tagged…and I have painstakingly tried to keep my library very well tagged!