Music Folder Utils

Note: I now primarily use beets for music library management. MFUtils remains available for specific desktop-integration needs, but for most library workflows I recommend evaluating Beets first.

Your music collection shouldn't look like a junk drawer. If your library is full of "Track01" files and folders named New Folder (7), you're doing it wrong — but you don't have to live with that mess.

MFUtils is my answer: a pragmatic, conservative tool that enforces good metadata, extracts cover art so your file manager actually shows album covers, and reorganizes files into a sane Artist/Album layout while refusing to clobber your data.

Why this matters:

• Ownership: if you own the files, you should be able to browse them like a library, not a landfill.
• Safety: automated scripts that move thousands of files should be conservative and observable.
• Desktop integration: folder art actually matters when you use a visual file manager.

What it does:

• Syncs tags against MusicBrainz before moving files.
• Extracts embedded art and writes it where GNOME/KDE will use it for folder icons.
• Reorganizes into Artists/Artist/Album with safe heuristics.
• Creates Albums/ and Tracks/ symlink views so you can browse in multiple ways without duplication.

Implementation notes:

• Rewritten in Rust because I don't trust brittle shell scripts to safely run on tens of thousands of files.
• Parallel processing for speed, explicit error handling for safety, and validation on import to keep junk out.

Use it like this:

mfutil all ~/Music          # sync tags, reorganize, extract art, create symlinks
mfutil sync ~/Music         # just sync metadata
mfutil import ~/Downloads/Music ~/Music
mfutil art ~/Music

Install locally:

cargo install --path .

Project lives under anoraktrend on GitHub/Codeberg. It's GPLv3 because this is software for people who want to own their media, not hand it over to a platform.

-# Unfortunately, this project is abandoned. Long live Beets.