help? database? folders? text? mp3s? no!!!

hey guys, in no way shape or form am i asking for homework help here! just had to say that, im more or less asking for some pointers in the right direction as per my idea in my head for my final web devolopment class at my college.

task:
take my mp3 drive, 4 folders: Albums, Sorted, Unsorted, MiniDisc and make them print out on a webpage, in like folder format like windows explorer, have it be searchable, and hopefully read ID3 tags? The directory stucture is as follows:

albums -> branches to 20 or so folders (named artist-album) then the mp3s contained inside, all propely index'd and id3'd
sorted -> contains 2500+ all properly named id3'd v1 and v2, format of file is artist - title.mp3
unsorted -> mp3s not renamed, id3'd etc.
minidisc -> 5 folders, contains the songs currently on my 5 minidiscs.

My goal is to make this website just have a simple layout, css based, use XML i think to make folders with the + you click and it expands and so forth and make it so i can just browse thru my mp3 collection, of course adding other features later, so, can anyone give me a few pointers, software or programs i might wanna look into, websites with information etc? help guys? im just really confused as per how to get my foot in the door on this project.

Thanks!

Sounds like you just need to get your MP3 info into a database. Then you're 85% done except for running a query and dumping out html.

There's a lot of different ways you can approach this.

I wrote a quick little PHP app once that did something similar. You basically configured it by pointing it to a directory somewhere on the server, and it would recursively analyze that directory, and build a JavaScript navigation tree in a left-frame, and display a file-listing of the selected folder in a right-frame. I made it look fairly identical to windows explorer, which was kind of neat.

Is that the kind of approach you're hoping to go for? Like rock suggested, and drastically different way to approach it would be to get all of your file data into a database, and deal with it that way.

Oh and btw, though I really have little familiarity with the ease of accessing ID3 attribute(s), I'm going to wager that it's not something you should hold your breath for. Generally speaking, reading file headers isn't something that's easily done without a third party application of some sort.

I got a ghetto solution ;)

lets say /www is the root of your web site ...

move your 4 main folders into /www

then, when explorer will browse, it will give a list to folders (the web server will send the contents, IE will parse it as a 'list')

and to search the entire thing, you could have a simple html file with the google "search site" button to search for mp3s


a rather "simpler" approach would be to have a VB or C (VB would look better) that would create a list of all your files and dump it into a text file, then you can do searches through there and you could have a function to read id3 tags, maybe even incorporate a small mp3 player.

one question: are you doing it for yourself or do you want to publish your entire music collection on the net?