The default desktop environment for Ubuntu has always been GNOME, so I decided to install KDE, this guide will step through what I did to install Arch Linux and then install KDE on my system.

I have used KDE before via Kubuntu, however I thought I would try Arch Linux becasue as they say, it’s a lightweight distrobution that keeps things simple

You’ve reached the website for Arch Linux, a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

This means I can install a clean copy of KDE and install only the applications I want.

First off, grab yourself an ISO from your closest mirror

archlinux-2011.08.19-netinstall-dual.iso (latest at time of writing) is recommended, burn the ISO and then boot your system from the CD

Please note that I have downloaded the netinstall ISO, this version requires your system to have a internet connection as everything will be pulled down from the internet during install, for offline installs, you will need to download archlinux-2011.08.19-core-dual.iso (latest version at time of writing)

Boot from the CD and select the architecture that matches your system

Once booted you have the opportunity to change the keyboard layout, the default is English US, to do this, type km and select a new layout, once ready, start the Arch Linux installer

/arch/setup

Press enter to go to the main menu

It is advisable to run though the step in order, to select an install source, highlight Select source and press enter

Select with repositories you want to enable, I accept the defaults and press enter

Select a mirror to install from, again, select the closest one to you

Before connecting, the install with bring up your network interface

Select the interface you wish to activate

Press enter to obtain an IP address via DHCP

Your connection should now be active

Back at the main menu, select an editor (Set editor) and choose nano (like it says, it’s the easiest one to use)

Set your clock from the Set clock menu using your region and location and also your time and date

Now it’s time to partition and format your hard drive, THIS WILL WIPE YOUR HARD DRIVE, PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BACKED UP EVERYTHING YOU WISH TO KEEP, you will NOT be able to recover anything lost

From the Prepare hard drive(s) menu, select Auto-Prepare and accept all the defaults (my system only has one hard drive)

Select your filesystem of choice, I use Ext4

Then select Yes to FORMAT AND COMPLETELY WIPE EVERYTHING FROM YOUR HARD DRIVE

Once you are back at the main menu, choose Select packages, accept all the defaults until you are once again back at the main menu

Select Install packages and your system will download and install all the packages your system needs

Once everything has been downloaded and installed, you will need to edit some configuration files, select Configure system and start of with System Config

At this point, the only setting you really need to change is HOSTNAME, enter here what you would like your system to be called, to save and exit files in nano, hold Ctrl and press O to write the file, then Ctrl then X to exit nano

From the Glibc Locales menu, remove the # from the beginning of all the locales you want your system to use, above I have enabled en_GB, save and exit the file

Edit the pacman.conf file and at the bottom add the following

[archlinuxfr]
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

This will enable the archlinuxfr repository, witch will come handy handy later

Edit the Pacman Mirror List and comment out the Mirror selected during installation, by putting a # before Server (not actually sure if that is needed)

Then, find your country and uncomment all the server beneath it

Create yourself a root password and then go back to the Main Menu

The initicpio images will be rebuilt at this point

Enter the Install bootloader menu and enter vga=773 at the end of each kernel line, this isn’t necessary, but it will configure your system to boot up with a nicer 1024×768 resolution

Select the your boot device (you should only have one option if you have one hard drive)

You can now exit the installer and reboot your system

reboot

Once rebooted you will now be able to log in with your root account

The first thing you will need to do is to create your own user account, running as root really isn’t a good idea

adduser username

Press enter to accept all the defaults apart from when asked for additional groups, here, enter the following

audio,lp,optical,storage,video,games,power,scanner,wheel

Press enter until you are asked for your password

While still logged in as root, install sudo, this will allow you to run root commands when logged in with your own account

When using pacman for the first time, you will need to tell it to synchronize its repository databases

pacman -Syy

Then you can install sudo

pacman -S sudo

Once installed you will need to allow the sudo group (wheel) to use sudo

visudo

Remove the # before the following line by moving the cursor down to the below line and pressing X to delete characters at the start of it

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Hold down Ctrl and press : then type wq! to save and exit the file

You can now log off as root and back in as your new user

Once logged in, it is time to start installing everything you need, first off is the X window system

sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-utils xorg-server-utils

Then install 3D support

sudo pacman -S mesa

You will now need to install video drivers for X

sudo pacman -S xf86-video-intel

I have selected xf86-video-intel as my system has an Intel on board graphics chipset, for NVIDIA cards install xf86-video-nouveau and for ATI install xf86-video-ati

If you don’t have an Intel, NVIDIA or ATI graphics card, there is xf86-video-vesa which supports a large number of graphics cards, but does not have 2D and 3D acceleration.

If you are installing Arch Linux on a laptop, you will need to install input drivers for X

sudo pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics

Synaptics (and ALPS) touchpads found on most laptops

After installing X you will need to configure your system to boot it instead of the default bebahour of boot to a console, to do this you will need to edit you inittab file

sudo nano /etc/inittab

Add a comment to id:3 and remove the one from id:5, like below

## Only one of the following two lines can be uncommented!
# Boot to console
#id:3:initdefault:
# Boot to X11
id:5:initdefault:

While we’re there, we will tell the system to start the KDE login manager (KDM) after booting to X by adding a comment to the XDM line and removing the one before KDM

# Example lines for starting a login manager
#x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/xdm -nodaemon
#x:5:respawn:/usr/sbin/gdm -nodaemon
x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon
#x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/slim >/dev/null 2>&1

Save and close the file

Then install the D-Bus messaging system

sudo pacman -S dbus

Once you have installed all the system components, it is a good idea to edit your rc.conf file

sudo nano /etc.rc.conf

Start off by adding dbus to the [DAEMONS] sections, like below

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng @network crond dbus)

It is also a good idea to background the network daemon if you are installing Arch Linux on a laptop as you may not have a connection when booting, the wireless components in KDE (along with networkmanager) will take care of this once you log in, to do this add @ at the beginning of network.

Now it is time to start installing KDE. I like to install a minimal copy of KDE and then add the components I want after

sudo pacma -S kdebase kde-l10n-en_gb phonon-gstreamer aspell-en

Above I have installed the base KDE package with the English UK language pack and the GStreamer audio framework, I have also installed aspell-en for English UK spell checking support for KDE

After installing the GStreamer backend for KDE, its a good idea to install some plugins for audio and video playback support

sudo pacman -S gstreamer0.10-plugins

Audio is normally working out of the box after you install X, however I had to install alsa-utils to get it working on my laptop

sudo pacman -S alsa-utils

You will want to install some fonts, ttf-dejavu is required (system fonts will be pretty ugly with out it), I also like to install a few other font packs

sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu ttf-droid ttf-liberation

Another set of fonts that are good for web rendering (making website look nice) are the Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts. These fonts are available from the Arch User Repository (AUR) and the archlinuxfr repository contains a handy tool called Yaourt that allows you to download and install packages straight from the AUR.

Before installing Yaourt you will need to install the base-devel group package as it contains tools required by Yaourt

sudo pacman -S base-devel

Once installed you can install Yaourt

sudo pacman -S yaourt

Now that Yaourt is insatlled, you can ask it to download, compile and install the MS fonts

yaourt ttf-ms-fonts

Yaourt will now search the AUR and present you with a list of packages

1 aur/fontconfig-ms-fonts-zh 1.0-1 (0)
Font configuration using ttf-ms-fonts-zh
2 aur/ttf-ms-fonts 2.0-9 [installed] (1570)
Core TTF Fonts from Microsoft
3 aur/ttf-ms-fonts-zh 1.0-1 (2)
Chinese TTF fonts from latest microsoft windows installation
4 aur/ttf-ms-fonts-zh_cn 1.1-2 (46)
ms fonts
==> Enter n° of packages to be installed (ex: 1 2 3 or 1-3)
==> --------------------------------------------------------
==>

The package we want is the second one, so type 2 and press enter

==> Edit PKGBUILD ? [Y/n] ("A" to abort)
==> ------------------------------------
==>

I always say no here

==> Edit ttf-ms-fonts.install ? [Y/n] ("A" to abort)
==> ------------------------------------------------
==>

Again, I say no

==> Continue building ttf-ms-fonts ? [Y/n]
==> --------------------------------------
==>

Then yes, Yaourt will now download, compile and ask you to install the package

==> Continue installing ttf-ms-fonts ? [Y/n]
==> [v]iew package contents [c]heck package with namcap
==> ---------------------------------------------------
==>

Type Y and press enter, you may be asked for your password at this point

Targets (1): ttf-ms-fonts-2.0-9

Total Installed Size:   5.46 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:       0.00 MiB

Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

Type Y, press enter and the MS fonts will be installed

While we are on the subject of fonts and Yaourt, and this step is totally optional, you may want to use Yaourt to install ttf-raghu, again, totally optional, I won’t judge ಠ_ಠ

So, quick recap, X (with drivers) is installed and configured to boot up then run KDM at start up and KDE is installed, with your required language support. Before rebooting, and into KDE, there are some other packages I like to install.

KMix is application that allows you to control your sound card, it also comes with an applet. ffmpegthumbs to enable video thumbnail support in Dolphin (the default KDE file manager)

sudo pacman -S kdemultimedia-kmix kdemultimedia-ffmpegthumbs

For network management (including wireless support) the KNetworkManager front-end is available as a widget

sudo pacman -S kdeplasma-appplets-networkmanaget

KNetworkManager will also install the networkmanager package and you will need to start it when your PC boots, to do this, open your rc.conf file

sudo nano /etc/rc.conf

then add networkmanager to the [DAEMONS] sections

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng @network crond dbus networkmanager)

Also, becasue the the copy of KDE we have install is so minimal, it doesn’t come with any screensavers, to install the default ones you will need to install then

sudo pacman -S kdeartwork-kscreensaver

Save and close the file and you can now reboot your system

sudo reboot

After rebooting you should be presented with the KDE login manager, enter your username and password and enjoy your new system with KDE.

If you have any issues and you are keen to learn or improve your Linux skills, the Arch Linux Wiki and forum are an invaluable resource of guides, how to’s and end user support.

Once I have KDE up and running I always like to install my favourite web browser, Google Chrome

yaourt google-chrome

After installing Chrome, if you start it up you will notice that the look and feel of it’s menus and dialog boxes do not match that of your KDE desktop (as it uses GTK2), to fix this you can install an Oxygen (default KDE theme) GTK2 theme, you can also install a nice GUI tools to easily allow you to change what GTK2 theme KDE should use

sudo pacman -S oxygen-gtk2 lxappearance

To change your GTK2 theme, click the launcher menu and under Setting select Customize Look and Feel

Installing Chrome is optional of course, Rekonq is the default web browser for KDE and is based on Webkit, the same as Chrome, however other popular browsers like Firefox and Opera are also available and easy to install.

Other applications I recommend are VLC for playing video

sudo pacman -S vlc

Clemetine for playing and managing music

sudo pacman -S clementine

and Gwenview for managaing and viewing pictures

sudo pacman -S kdegraphics-gwenview

Keeping your system up to date is done via pacman

sudo pacman -Syu

Pacman is a very powerful tool, and it worth familiarizing yourself with it, the Wiki entry is a good place to start.

I hope you find this guide useful, and would like to hear from you if you did.

My main reason is to run one as a media box plugged into my TV via the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port, and last week the XBMC team released a video of their software running on a Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is capable of decoding 1080p video and with it’s HDMI port make it a perfect media streamer.

The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.

Raspberry Pi’s should hopefully start shipping late Janusry, early Februrary 2012, and I cannot wait!

* Prices are an estimate based on current conversion rates.

As my article on installing MiniDLNA on Ubuntu is so far my post popular, I though I’d document how I installed and configured it on Arch.

There is a MiniDLNA package for Arch in the community reposotory, meaning it can be installed very easily via Pacman (the following commands have been run as root, add sudo to the beginning of them if you have installed and configured it)

pacman -S minidlna

Once installed, edit the MiniDLNA configuration file and enter the paths of the media you wish to share, and, if you wish, rename your server.

I prefer to edit text files with nano, however you can swap nano for your editor of choice

nano /etc/minidlna.conf

Once you have configuration file open for editing add the following, remembering to update the paths

media_dir=A,/media/storage/Share/Music
media_dir=P,/media/storage/Share/Pictures
media_dir=V,/media/storage/Share/Videos

You can rename the name of your server by removing the the # from friendly_name and changing its name, for example

friendly_name=SERVER

Save the file and you are done, you can control the service using the initscript in /etc/rc.d, and you start MiniDLNA at boot my adding minidlna to you list of daemons in /etc/rc.conf

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network crond dbus gdm networkmanager minidlna)

The MiniDLNA ArchWiki entry has an additional step that is optional which is to enable the MiniDLNA cache feature (a feature I do not use myself), this allows the database and album art to be cached.

mkdir /var/{cache,log}/minidlna
chown nobody:nobody /var/{cache,log}/minidlna

This will create the required directories and also set their permissions, once created you will need to add the paths to your minidlna.conf file

db_dir=/var/cache/minidlna
log_dir=/var/log/minidlna

Happy streaming.

Installing MiniDLNA is available in the default repositories if you are running Ubuntu 11.10 and it can be installed by running the command

sudo apt-get install minidlna

If you are using a version of Ubuntu older than 11.10, you will need to add the stedy-minidlna PPA (view this post if the command below does not work)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stedy6/stedy-minidna

Then you can install MiniDLNA

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install minidlna

Once installed, all that is left is to edit the configuration file

sudo nano /etc/minidlna.conf

Add the following to your conf file, remembering to update the paths to your media

media_dir=A,/media/storage/Share/Music
media_dir=P,/media/storage/Share/Pictures
media_dir=V,/media/storage/Share/Videos

And finally, and this is totally optional, if you wish to rename your server, remove the # from the friendly_name line, and enter your chosen name, like below

friendly_name=SERVER

MiniDLNA is now configured to share your media, to force a database rescan run

sudo minidlna -R

You can also restart the service using the command

sudo service minidlna restart

For anyone interested, I have also published an Arch Linux version of this guide here.

Personal Package Archives (PPA) allow you to upload Ubuntu source packages to be built and published as an apt repository by Launchpad.

It saves you having to download and compile software if it isn’t available from the default Ubuntu repositories, it will also allow you (in some cases) to update existing software.

To easlity add a PPA to your list of repositories on Ubuntu Server, firstly you will need to install python-software-properties

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

You can now add PPA’s using the following command

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:name-of-repository

Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address.

To install Fail2ban, from the command like enter the following

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

Once installed, you will need to make a local copy of the configuration file, to do this change to the Fail2ban directory

cd /etc/fail2ban

Then copy the configuration file

sudo cp jail.conf jail.local

Finally, open jail.local

sudo nano jail.local

And configure the IP addresses you want Fail2ban to ignore (ignoreip), the ban time in minutes (bantime) and the maximum number of user attempts (maxretry).

# "ignoreip" can be an IP address, a CIDR mask or a DNS host
ignoreip = 127.0.0.1/8
bantime  = 600
maxretry = 3

More information can be found in the Fail2ban Ubuntu Documentation.

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-extras-keyring

Then run another update and the errors should be gone.

My requirements for a home server are pretty simple, I would like it to function as a seedbox, to be able to download from Usenet, stream my media using DLNA/UPnP and more importantly to be accessible from my Windows 7 desktop and laptop for file storage.

After looking at my various options, including FreeNAS and Amahi, I decided to go with Ubuntu Server.

After installing Ubuntu Server and setting up my new external hard drive, it was time to set up my Windows Share.

To quote the Ubuntu Documentation

One of the most common ways to network Ubuntu and Windows computers is to configure Samba as a File Server.

If you did not install Samba whilst installing Ubuntu Server, you can install it by entering the following command

sudo apt-get install samba

The next step is to create a Samba user with the same name and password of your Windows account

sudo smbpasswd -a Ben

You will prompted to enter a password for your new Samba user, make sure this is the same as your Windows account, after doing this, enable the Samba user

sudo smbpasswd -e Ben

Then create a new file where you will map the two together

sudo nano /etc/samba/smbusers

Then map your Linux account to your Windows (Samba) account by adding

ben = Ben

Finally, save and close the file (hold Ctrl and press O to save the file then hold Ctrl and press X to exit nano)

The next step it to configure Samba and create your share, all the Samba configuration is stored in /etc/samba/smb.conf, open this file for editing

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Look for the following line in the Authentication section

#   security = user

And replace it with

security = user

The sets Samba to use the user security mode which means that in order to access a share, the user must have an account on the server which can be mapped using the username map setting, to set this up, add the following line into the Authentication section of smb.conf

username map = /etc/samba/smbusers

Finally we now configure our share itself, go to the end of smb.conf and adding

[Share]
    path = /media/storage/Share
    read only = yes
    write list = ben
    guest ok = no

[Share] is the name of the share and is what will be shown when you access your server using Windows Explorer.

path is the path to the folder on the server you wish to share.

read only makes the share read only.

write list lists the users who have write access to the share, in this case it is my Linux account that is also mapped to the Samba user Ben, as I log onto my Windows desktop and laptop as Ben means we will have write access to the share.

guest ok means that guests do no have access to the share, only logged in users from the write list.

And that’s it, restart the service by running

sudo service smbd restart

Your share should now be visible.

If you have any questions please check the Official Samba 3.5.x HOWTO and Reference Guide or post them in the comments and I’ll try to help out where I can.

My most frequently used and favourite plugin is foo_upnp, this will turn foobar2000 into a UPnP/DLNA renderer, server and control point.

You will need to install foo_upnp on the PC you wish to stream music from (server) and also any PC’s you wish to stream to (client).

To get started you first need to download the plugin and save it somewhere on your PC, next open foobar2000 and open the “Preferences” window (either by clicking “File” then “Preferences” or by holding down “Ctrl” and pressing “P“), click on “Components” to show a list of the currently installed plugins.

List of installed components.

Click “Install” and browse to where you saved foo_upnp.zip, double click on the zip file to return to the list of components and click OK.

Select the new plugin to install.

You will then be prompted to restart foobar2000.

Click OK to restart foobar2000.

Once you have installed foo_upnp on your server and clients, you will first need to configure your server. To do this, open the “Preferences” windows on your server PC and under “Tools” you will have a new entry called “UPnP“, click on this to expand the options.

The first two sections, “Browser” and “Controller” I leave as default. However, those sections allow you to control what information is shown when you display music from your foo_upnp server in foobar2000 (Browser) and when controlling foobar2000 remotely via foo_upnp (Controller).

The main configuration of the server is done under the “Server” section. Click on “Basic Settings” and rename the server to whatever you would like it show when you browse for UPnP devices, by default it will use the name of the account you are logged in as.

You can change the port the service runs on in the Port (HTTP) field.

Finally, under basic settings, you also have the option to capture an information for troubleshooting/debugging purposes.

Renaming and controlling the server.

At this point you are ready to start streaming your music, however there are still a few more options available that will allow you to customize your server.

Under “Contents” you can select if you want the playlists you may have created on your server to shared by enabling “Show Playlists“.

foo_upnp “Contents”.

“Show Media Library” should be enabled, without this it will not show any music that you have added to the foobar2000 media library on your server.

You can also stream anything that is currently being played in foobar2000 by enabling “Show Playback Stream Capture” this is useful for streaming live audio feeds and streaming gapless albums.

“Allow album art streaming” will send any embedded or non-embedded (folder.jpg, cover.jpg etc) to your client and finally “Submit playback statistics” will collect and maintain statistics for played songs as long as you have foo_playcount installed on your server.

To transcode your streaming audio, allowing non-supported formats to be played on pretty much any device, click on “Streaming Profiles“, foo_upnp has preconfigured profiles for PlugPlayer, Windows Media Player, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Linn DS.

If you plan on streaming your music to an Android device, I highly recommend BubbleUPnP, it is excellent and was created by the developer of foo_upnp.

foo_upnp’s streaming profiles.

One very useful feature of foo_upnp is the ability to allow your audio to be streamed over the internet, under “Internet Access” enable “Allow Internet access“, enter your external IP address (or setup a DynDNS account if your ISP does not give you a fixed IP) and enter a username and password.

Don’t forget to forward port 56923 to the internal IP address of your server.

Allowing internet access to foo_upnp.

Now that your server has been configured, you can now install and run foo_upnp on your client PC’s.

Follow the same installation procedure as above and stop the server under “Basic Settings” (unless you wish to stream audio from this PC too), click “View” on the main foobar2000 window, select “UPnP Browser” and you should see your server listed.

List of your available UPnP servers.

You can browse your music library by clicking on your server then “Media Library“, once you have found an album you wish to listern to, click on the album title once, and the whole album will be added to your playlist.

Selecting albums via foo_upnp.

If you wish to stream your music over the internet, providing you have enabled it on your server, open the UPnP browser, right click in an empty part of the window, and select “Add Remote foobar2000 UPnP Server“.

Adding an external foo_upnp server.

Enter the address of your server along with your username and password, click “OK” and your server will be added to the browser list like normal. You can control how (or if) your music is transcoded when connecting via the internet by entering the Streaming Profiles on your server, make sure the Internet Connection box is ticked.

Happy streaming, and if you have any questions of comments, please post them in the comments and I’ll try to help where I can, alternatively, you can ask questions in the official foo_upnp thread over at Hydrogenaudio.

In the past I have been using the excellent Mp3tag, however, after reading a few forum posts where people were mentioning and praising foobar2000 and it’s component “File Operations” (aka foo_fileops) I decided to looking into it myself.

I was amazed at how simple foo_fileops was to use and also by how powerful and configurable it was, it took no time at all for me to tidy up my entire music collection.

To get started you need to make sure your copy of foobar has foo_fileops installed, to do this, during the of foobar install select enable “File Operations” under “Optional features“.

Installing foobar2000 with foo_fileops.

It is very important that the ID3 tags contained in your music files are set correctly BEFORE you attempt to organise your music with foo_fileops as it uses this data to create folders and rename files.

The tags you need to assist foo_fileops are

Artist Name
Track Title
Album Title
Date
Genre (optional)
Album Artist (optional, see below)
Track Number
Total Tracks (optional)

You only need to populate the “Album Artist” tag if the album is a complication, a popular value for this field is “Various Artists“.

Album ID3 tags.

Track ID3 tags.

Luckily, to make tidying up your tags easy, foobar has a few built-in functions. Select an album, right click and select “Properties” (or press “Alt+ENTER“) then right click on the field you wish to clean up, e.g. “Title“, and select “Capitalize“. You can also easily set the track numbers along with the total number of tracks by right clicking on any field and select “Auto track number“.

Cleaning up your tags.

Once you are happy with your tags, you can then move onto foo_fileops.

As an example, here is a folder called “C:\Users\bvassie\Desktop\Music\EACRip” that contains an album I have ripped from CD.

Folder structure and file names are messy.

Drag the folder into foobar2000 (or click “File“, “Add Folder” in foobar) and it should automatically be highlighted, right click on the highlighted music, select “File Operations“, “Copy To” (or “Move To” if you wish) and “…” to configure a new preset.

Highlight the music you wish to move.

The first option is “Operation type“, here you can choose to either copy, move or rename the music you have selected (in case you have changed your mind from the previous step), select the folder under “Destination folder:” where you want the music to me copied or moved to, “File name pattern:” is where foo_fileops can use the data from your tags to create a new folder structure and/or rename files.

Personally I like to structure my music in the following format

Album Artist [Year] Album Title\Track Number – Title

for example

Arcade Fire [2011] The Suburbs (Deluxe Edition)\01 – The Suburbs.mp3

To create this folder structure and rename the files via foo_fileops I have the following in the “File name pattern:” field

%album artist% '['%year%']' %album%\%tracknumber% - %title%

You can edit the above sting to suit your existing directory structure, a list of foobar’s built-in titleformatting functions and field references can be found here.

Leave “Copy entire source folder content” enabled to ensure that album art (folder.jpg, cover.jpg etc) contained in the folder is also copied/moved, “Remove empty source folders” will be greyed out if the “Operation type” is set to “Copy” (if the “Operation type is set to “Move” it is best to disable it so that you still have your original source files should something go wrong), disable “Show output files when done” (although this option is up to you).

Once you are happy with your setup you have the option to save it as a preset for future use, simply type in a name under “Presets” and click “Save“.

foo_fileops configuration.

Click “Run” and foo_fileops will work it’s magic and re-organize your music.

Folder structure and filenames cleaned up, sorry for using a different album in this example.

foo_fileops has copied the music from “C:\Users\bvassie\Desktop\Music\EACRip” to “C:\Ben\Music\Arcade Fire\The Suburbs“, it has also renamed the individual files from tracknumber title to tracknumber – title e.g. “01 The Suburbs.mp3” to “01 – The Suburbs.mp3“.

There is lots more foo_filesops can do, and I encourage you to play around with it, if you have any tips, please leave them in the comments and I will try to help out where I can.