I have all my music set up like this:
<Artist><\><Album><\><Artist>-<Album>-<TrackNr>-<Title>-<Genre>-<Year>.mp3

I found a bunch of duplicates that have different naming strings and I am not totally sure what bitrate they are compared to my nicely formatted files of which I know are EAC/Lame encoded. I want to make room on my drives by getting rid of the files that are of lower bitrate and if they are exact duplicates. I would like to get all of my MP3's into one large directory called "All_MP3". From that directory I can sort by filename and then delete all duplicates and fix any files that are not set with the sheme <Artist>-<Album>-<TrackNr>-<Title>-<Genre>-<Year>.mp3. Then I can use MP3TS and get them back into the directory structure I want.

With that being said, the question is how can I move a large amount of files in separate directories over to one directory with out a lot of manual cut & paste? Will MP3TS do this? Tag and Rename? Some other program that I am not aware of?

if you have cygwin installed:

find /path/to/mp3/root -name \*.mp3 -exec mv {} /path/to/single/directory \;

--dan.

Using Explorer, right click on the parent folder of your MP3s and say "SEARCH"

Search for *.* or *.MP3 whichever you like.

The result will be a sortable list of every MP3 in and below that folder.

You can either work with that list directly, or press CTRL-A (select all) and either move or copy the entire file list to a new folder where they will all be "flat" instead of in subdirectories.

It is kind of funny. I tried that first and it would not let me move the files from one particular directory. I thought that maybe it was not possible to do that way. Then just now after you posted I tried it again on another folder and it works fine....go figure. So once again the FAQ Master gets the pebble! I wouldn't have tried it again had you not posted. Thanks.

Cool, glad it's working for you. I can't imagine why it wouldn't let you move one of the folders unless it was a security issue with the files or something. Or maybe the files were locked-open by a player app or another explorer window with the preview pane turned on. Who knows? It's Windows, after all, could have just been FM.

There's a chance that you wouldn't even need to move the files anyway. In theory, you should be able to do what you need without moving them at all, since the search results are sortable and the files themselves are "live".