PowerShell : Get MP3/MP4 File’s MetaData and How to use it to make your Life easy

Well, it’s Saturday night and I was watching some of the old Powershell tutorials, which I had downloaded from Microsoft Virtual Academy.

THE PROBLEM :

But problem with these downloaded tutorials is that – They have a Default download name, and one can barely understand the Content inside each vedio. see in the below picture.

SOLUTION :

Media players like, iTunes and Windows Media Player displays detailed information for all the media files, but where do they get this information from?

Answer to this is METADATA of that file .

So why not  dig this Metadata to get more information about the files and see if we can get something useful, hence the following script.

SCRIPT :

	Function Get-MP3MetaData
	{
	[CmdletBinding()]
	[Alias()]
	[OutputType([Psobject])]
	Param
	(
	[String] [Parameter(Mandatory=$true, ValueFromPipeline=$true)] $Directory
	)
	Begin
	{
	$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application"
	}
	Process
	{
	Foreach($Dir in $Directory)
	{
	$ObjDir = $shell.NameSpace($Dir)
	$Files = gci $Dir| ?{$_.Extension -in '.mp3','.mp4'}
	Foreach($File in $Files)
	{
	$ObjFile = $ObjDir.parsename($File.Name)
	$MetaData = @{}
	$MP3 = ($ObjDir.Items()|?{$_.path -like "*.mp3" -or $_.path -like "*.mp4"})
	$PropertArray = 0,1,2,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,27,28,36,220,223
	Foreach($item in $PropertArray)
	{
	If($ObjDir.GetDetailsOf($ObjFile, $item)) #To avoid empty values
	{
	$MetaData[$($ObjDir.GetDetailsOf($MP3,$item))] = $ObjDir.GetDetailsOf($ObjFile, $item)
	}
	}
	New-Object psobject -Property $MetaData |select *, @{n="Directory";e={$Dir}}, @{n="Fullname";e={Join-Path $Dir $File.Name -Resolve}}, @{n="Extension";e={$File.Extension}}
	}
	}
	}
	End
	{
	}
	}
	#ForEach($item in ("D:\Powershell\Tutorials\4_DSC" |Get-MP3MetaData)){
	# $NewName = [regex]::Replace($(($item.Title).Split(":")[1].Trim() + $item.extension),"[*(/)\\&#]",{''})
	# $Oldname = $item.Fullname
	# Rename-Item -LiteralPath $item.Fullname -NewName $NewName -Force
	#}

view raw Get-MP3MetaData.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

HOW IT WORKS :

Just feed the function with the directory path, where all your .MP3 or .MP4 files are located and you’ll get the MetaData associated with each file, like in the below picture.

You can use this MetaData in many different ways, like I used it to Rename the downloaded files to solve my problem in the following animation.

Or, you can move all the songs which you’ve downloaded to a folder Categorized by their respective Album name, this is pretty handy too 😉 using the following script.

	ForEach($item in ("C:\Users\Prateek\Downloads\music" |Get-MP3MetaData)){
	$Source = $item.Fullname
	$Album = $item.Album
	Set-Location C:\Music
	If(-not (gci | ?{$_.name -eq "$Album" -and $_.PSisContainer}))
	{
	New-Item -Name $Album -ItemType Directory -Force |Out-Null
	}
	$destination = "C:\Music\$album"
	Move-Item -Path $Source -Destination $destination -Force -Verbose
	}

view raw MoveMusicFilesToAlbumFolders.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

and you’ll end up with folder structures with the Album name’s from the MetaData that has all your songs categorized properly within these folders.

	ForEach($item in ("C:\Users\Prateek\Downloads\music" |Get-MP3MetaData)){
	$Source = $item.Fullname
	$Album = $item.Album
	Set-Location C:\Music
	If(-not (gci | ?{$_.name -eq "$Album" -and $_.PSisContainer}))
	{
	New-Item -Name $Album -ItemType Directory -Force |Out-Null
	}
	$destination = "C:\Music\$album"
	Move-Item -Path $Source -Destination $destination -Force -Verbose
	}

view raw

MoveMusicFilesToAlbumFolders.ps1

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Hoping you’ll find it fun!! 🙂 Happy weekends!

Prateek Singh
Follow @SinghPrateik