Brandon,

Welcome to the wonderful world of programming - don't be discouraged, this happens to the best of us
--

OK, from what you have posted - you're main problem is a file path problem. My advice?

start fresh

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my ($album_id,$track_id,$filepath,%music);
$filepath = 'Y:/perlscripts2/software/perl2/music'
opendir DH, $filepath or die $!;

# magic one-liner to "fix" your path problems
chdir($filepath);

while(readdir(DH)){
    # don't evaluate special dirs '.' & '..'
    # or anything that doesn't end in .txt
    next if $_ eq "." or $_ eq ".." or $_ !~ /\.txt$/;

    # explicitly test this item to see if it's a 
    # regular file and if it's readable (notice the
    # use of the default filehandle test var '_')
    next unless -f $_ and -r _;

    # arrival here signifies we have a readable,
    # regular file. Extract its contents into a hash
    open FH, '<', $_ or die "could not open file: $_\n";

    # use the actual filename to pull the album & artist
    my ($name, $artist) = split /\-|\.txt/;
    $album_id++; $track_id = 0;
    $music{$album_id}{ALBUM}  = $name; 
    $music{$album_id}{ARTIST} = $artist; 

    while (my $line = <FH>) {
    # the lines of this file are of the format
    # <track>:<minutes>:<seconds>:<genre>
    my ($track, $minutes, $seconds, $genre) = split /\:/, $line;
    $track_id++;
    $music{$album_id}{$track_id}{TRACK}{TITLE}    = $track;
    $music{$album_id}{$track_id}{TRACK}{DURATION} = [$minutes,$seconds
+];
    $music{$album_id}{$track_id}{TRACK}{GENRE}    = $genre;
    }
    close FH;
}
print Dumper \%music;
__END__
[download]

You're almost there mate. Keep at it.

Shadowsong, I appreciate all of the help that you have given me. The below code is what I was able to get to work and print out successfully. I did use some of the items that presented in your previous post. My issues were around setting up the hashes and keys. But, we will see what the instructor says about what I came up with. It is nice to know that there are folks out there willing help a newbie such as myself.

#!usr/bin/perl -l
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my ($artist, $song_title, $filepath, %length,);
$filepath = 'Y:/perlscripts2/software/perl2/music';
opendir DH, $filepath or die $!; 

chdir($filepath);

while ($_ = readdir(DH))
{
    next if $_ eq "." or $_ eq ".." or $_ !~ m/\.txt$/;
    next unless -f $_ and -r $_;
    open FH, '<', $_ or die "could not open file: $_\n";
    my ($artist, $song_title) = split /\-|\.txt/;
    $length{$artist}{artist} = $artist;
    $length{$artist}{song_title} = $song_title;
    while (my $line = <FH>){
    my ($album, $minutes, $seconds, $genre) = split ':', $line, 4;
        $length{$artist}{album} = $album;
        $length{$artist}{minutes} = $minutes;
        $length{$artist}{seconds} = $seconds;
        $length{$artist}{genre} = $genre;
        }
    close FH;
}

    foreach my $artist ( sort keys %length )
    {
        print "$length{$artist}{artist} has a total $length{$artist}{m
+inutes}:$length{$artist}{seconds} of music.\n";
    }
[download]

Thanks, Brandon

Brandon,

I'm glad you got it working in the end (and didn't quit, like so many others do).

Any questions/issues/thoughts feel free to ask us Monks.

Best Regards,
Shadowsong