Álvaro Ramírez

It's been well over a year now since I've moved most of my music consumption away from streaming. I restarted purchasing music, just so I can play offline at any time (and on my terms). That's not so say I don't stream, but that's now purely reserved for discovery. These most playback happens via Ready Player Mode, a little player I built when I decided to make the offline playback jump. This post isn't so much about Ready Player and more about a recent dired experience.

I had a directory with a handful of mp3s, which I wanted to split into separate album subdirectories. The challenge being the mp3 file names did not include the album name. Sorting this out isn't a big task for a music-organization tool, but my brain quickly went hmmm… if dired displayed album metadata, I could just use that to quickly guide me through all the file management I needed. After all, I already know how to use ffprobe to extract relevant metadata, so I could just enhance dired's listing to also show me metadata as overlays. dired-git-info does just that.

With that, ready-player-dired-mode was born. After enabling with M-x ready-player-dired-mode, I can easily get on with my tiny file reorg without any procrastination whatsoever.

I've just pushed ready-player-dired-mode to Ready Player's GitHub repo. It's pretty fresh, so you may (or may not) encounter rough edges.