So a few weeks ago I got it in my head that I should share with the world my MP3 collection. I figured it would be interesting, be good for me so that I could keep track of it myself, hopefully generate some income for me, and it would allow me to constantly be adding content to my website since I am always getting new music. The search engines love web pages that update often. I also hoped that viewers would find it interesting and I am including the album cover for all of my albums and I am sure there are people out there like me and it can be a serious pain in the butt trying to find pictures of some of those rare album covers.

This project really made me wish I knew some programming language like perl. If I knew perl or something this whole process could have been much less painless and much more automated but I don’t know it so I had to make do with something else.

Luckily for me I found a program called MP3 HTML Generator which did the bulk of the work for me. I still had to do a LOT of work though. I have pretty much been working on this project day and night for the last three weeks. I mean that literally too, for many of the days in the last three weeks I have been working on this from the time I got up till I went to bed. One thing I definitely am is persistant.

The way MP3 HTML Generator works is you tell it where you have your MP3 files stored it reads through your collection and using your ID3 tags it spits out the HTML source code for you. There are several different templates you can use and you can use your own templates as well (but they are kind of limited). I ended up using a portal type interface for mine which to me makes the most sense. The other style all seem to just spit out a really long list of your entire collection and the portal style first gives you a list of all your artists, you select and artist and it shows you all the albums you have for that artist and then you select an album and it shows you all the songs on that album.

Here are some examples of the different styles that MP3 HTML Generator can do for you.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

And here is the portal example, the style that I used.

Example 4

I have nearly 200gigs of MP3’s, over 30,000 of them so as you can probably imagine this was a daunting project.

When all was said and done MP3 HTML Generator created just shy of 3,000 new HTML pages. Now because of the limitations in the program I had to go in and edit each and every one of these pages.

MP3 HTML Generator allowed me to do this project and I wouldn’t have attempted this project without it. That said the program could definitely use some improvements. You are allowed to use your own templates but you are limited to having the program just stick the code into one place in your template, you just put the following line in your code

< !-- BODY_TEMPLATE_PAGE -- >

And the HTML that is generated is just stuck in your page there. The program would be incredibly more useful if you could make the artist names appear where you wanted it just by putting something like <#artist#> on the page, that way you could put the artist up in the title of the page, in the H1 tags, etc. You should be able to do this will all attributes such as title, genre, length, year, album cover, etc. If this program did this I would have been in heaven.

Another thing that would make this program much, much better would be customizable URLs. As it is right now the program just makes the URLs in sequential order so all of your generated pages are something like music_01.html, music_02.html. music_03.html etc. It would be absolutely fantastic if it used your file structure for the url. That way you would have URLs that looked like music/audioslave/revelations.html or something to that effect, this would make this program worth a fortune to me.

The program is also a bit buggy. You assign the album covers to the MP3s within the program, I had it randomly inserting covers in the improper place. The program was also too smart for it’s own good. On soundtracks and Various Artists CDs it wouldn’t allow me to assign the cover to the entire album in one shot because the artist name didn’t match up. This was EXTREMELY annoying as I had to do each track individually.

If you are looking to take on a project like this I can recommend that you use MP3 HTML Generator because it seems to be the best thing out there but realize that you will most likely run into some limitations. If you know perl or another language and you happen to write a better program PLEASE let me know, especially if you happen to incorporate any of the things I mentioned above that this program is lacking.

Here is the final result of the last three weeks of hard work:

Moe’s Massive MP3 Collection