Deleting mass files ending in specific characters

COSenna:

Look at this link:

Indexes

which says, among other things:

By default, "Everything" indexes all local fixed NTFS volumes.

Everything will automatically index all fixed NTFS volumes.

Use folder indexing to include mapped network drives, CDRoms, DVDRoms, FAT and FAT32 volumes.

And here's what the folder indexing link says:

Folder indexing allows Everything to include any folder in the Everything index.

Indexed folders can go offline and remain in the Everything index.

For example, with folder indexing you can index:

Network shares or mapped network drives.
FAT32 and other volumes.
Any physical folder.

Folder indexing does not require administrative privileges or the Everything service.

Why is indexing so slow?

Folder indexing uses the same approach as the Windows search.

This can be a lot slower than NTFS indexing.

Everything can take a couple minutes to scan a folder and all its subfolders and files.

How do I add a folder to the Everything index?

In Everything, from the Tools menu, click Options.
Click the Folders tab.
Click Add....
Select a folder to add to the Everything index.
Click OK.
Click OK.

Maybe I'm a sucker for not wanting to install an app that you'll only use once and then leave it there forever on the chance that you'll need it again. Creating unnecessary registry keys and the likes. But I'm going against the grain here and say batch renaming can also easily be done in powershell, and I believe I could write a pretty simple batch file to do it in command prompt.

Seems kinda silly to me like an app to clone a disk when it's a standard function you can do in 5 parts of windows, and in some cases easier than the third party apps. But there's millions out there for just that purpose. Or, in your specifc case, why have an app generate an index of a drive when you can just pony off the windows index. And most of those apps do the operations in cmd in the background anyways.

But what works best for you is the best choice. If you're more comfortable with some freeware apps, use those.

Well, frankly I personally use Everything search exclusively. I have also disabled Windows indexing. It sits in the right click menu and is many many times faster than Windows search, and where windows search will show you all sorts of irrelevant files in the results, Everything only returns relevant results. As the OP I have 1.2 TB of music files in almost 7000 folders and when all of a sudden about 5000+ of those folders decided to duplicate the 80000+ files in them I was able to use Everything to fix the problem in minutes not hours. Glad I had it on my system.
Secondly not everyone knows how to write batch files so nuff said.

Bill

So I moved all the music and files to a NTSC drive and used "Everything" to delete all the duplicates. Now as for renaming, I downloaded the Bulk renaming utility but I don't think it is very "bulk" in renaming. An indexing renaming tool is really what I need.

After doing a google search I ran into this program...

Métamorphose : A File and Folder Renamer - Powerful batch renamer

Does that look like what I would need? I really wish the "everything" program could rename, I'd be completely done in about 10 min!

See post 11. You didn't have to move those files to an NTFS drive. Everything will search FAT32 by folder.

I know nothing about Metamorphose. On the face of it, it looks like it would work.

Not sure what you mean by an "index renaming tool".

I can vouch for Flexible Renamer, here:

The Portable Freeware Collection - Flexible Renamer

It's portable, you run it directly off the exe file rather than installing it.

There's another good one called "Name It Your Way", but I don't know where to get it nowadays. The downloadable file is named niyowins.exe. You might be able to find it with that search term.

I urge you to make copies of all files you intend to rename before starting. Renaming tools are powerful and something could go wrong on thousands of files in one operation that you could not easily undo, although the better ones have "undo" functions.

I went ahead and moved it all to the new drive before checking the forum and seeing I could've done it in FAT32. Its probably a good thing however, in case something goes horribly wrong!

What I meant by indexing was pretty much what the Everything program can do, which is look for all files in all folders and make a list of them. This way I could rename a massive amount of files instead of going under each folder and highlighting everything inside and renaming them in their individual albums. Even with all the duplicates eliminated this thought of this makes me cringe.

This may be asking a little much from a free renaming tool, but maybe as someone had said, a batch cmd? I have little to no experience in such though so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Give examples of your folder structure and what your remaining files now look like. Several examples.

In my experience, a renaming tool works recursively down into sub-folders.

So--imagine this folder structure:

MP3 is the parent. Inside it are genre folders, like rock, blues, country. Inside the genre folders are artist folders like Johnny Cash, Elvis, Muddy Waters.

So, for individual files, you might have:

MP3/country/Johnny Cash/034Johnny Cash - I Got Stripes^^^^333388.mp3

MP3/blues/Muddy Waters/442MuddyWaters - I'm Ready454.mp3

MP3/rock/Elvis/223Elvis Presley - Mystery Train565.mp3

A renaming app can operate on all 3 of those songs at the same time to eliminate the unwanted characters, leaving you with the likes of Elvis Presley - Mystery Train.mp3.

The app can cut characters from any position in the file name, whether at the beginning, end, or interior. You may have to issue a series of commands, one after the other. The first to chop from the tail, the second to chop from the beginning, the third to chop from somewhere in the interior, etc.

Still not quite following why you think this would not work for you.

I'm assuming the remaining files are poorly named in some recognizable pattern or patterns---e.g. some are "wrong" in this way and some are "wrong" in that way. Attack this pattern with this command and attack that pattern with that command, separately.

All of my folders are laid out like this:

MyMusic/Artist/Album/Song Name

I just found however that there are a ton of songs that start like this:

01-01 Songname@0.mp3
01-02 Songname@0.mp3
...
20-01 Songname@0.mp3
20-02 Songname@0.mp3...

And a lot like this:

1-01 Songname@0.mp3
1-02 Songname@0.mp3
...


But most like this...

01 Songname@0.mp3
02 Songname@0.mp3


I have a feeling I am screwed.

I'm still not clear on the precise difference between what you have and what you want.

List some actual true and complete file names as they show in Explorer. Not what they are "like".

Is the 01, 02, 1-01 stuff at the beginning actually part of the file name? Or not.

Or is the only thing wrong just the trailing @0 just before the dot mp3? That can certainly be eliminated.

For instance, consider:

01-01 Songname@0.mp3

How much of that is a filename per se? Do these MP3s have tags? What do you want that example to be instead? 01-01 Songname.mp3? Songname.mp3? Something else?

Confused still.

Here is a screen shot of a section opened with Everything:



The 3-01, 3-02, etc., is what I do not want.

Where I highlighted "2am" is the name of the actual song. Therefore there are many songs which did not get the added numbers to the beginning.

The songs with 27, 28, 29 in front of them are incorrect as well.

With the name editing program I used (Bulk Rename Utility,) I was not able to find any option except delete per se, the first two, or last three characters in the name of the file. Since the first characters in any given file are not of the same amount then I cannot use this option.

If I were to delete the first two characters of every file then I would have the song "2am.mp3" be renamed to "m.mp3"