Linux – Why doesn’t the Linux vfat driver allow certain characters

You can make a view of the FAT filesystem with POSIX semantics, including supporting file names with any character other than / or a null byte. POSIXovl is a relatively recent FUSE filesystem for this.

mkdir backup-fat
mount.posixovl -S /media/sdb1 backup-fat
rsync -au /source backup-fat/target

Characters in file names that VFAT doesn't accept are encoded as %(XX) where XX are hexadecimal digits. As of POSIXovl 1.2.20120215, beware that a file name like %(3A) is encoded as itself, and will be decoded as :, so there is a risk of collision if you have file names containing substrings of the form %(XX).

Beware that POSIXovl does not cope with file names that are too long. If the encoded name doesn't fit in 255 characters, the file can't be stored.

POSIXovl stores unix permissions and ownership in files called .pxovl.FILENAME.

You can certainly create a directory of links to your music in the structure you've described, if it's anything but a FAT filesystem, but FAT doesn't support links, so you'd have to create Windows LNK files (aka shortcuts).

NOTE: Incidentally you may be able to create LNK files using either of these tools. These tools are described as: allowing you to create Windows Shortcut files (extension .LNK) without needing a Windows OS.

But often it's better to create play list files and leave the music in some standardized structure or as a single sub-directory with other sub-directories within it.

To organize the MP3 headers you can use MusicBrainz's tool Picard to make sure the ID3 tags are all up to date on your collection.

There are many tools such as Clementine for constructing playlists. It's discussed here in this AU Q&A titled: Need a playlist creator for linux that will do relative paths.