Sorting/selecting music files

[FredTastic]

Win 7 Home 64 bit. I have about 3,000 music CD's ripped to .FLAC & stored on a HDD, one album per folder. Total of about 30,000 songs. I would like to browse through them, and select tunes to put on my mp3 player. Ideally, I'd like to be able to open the folder of an album, highlight a song, then hit some key command ("ctrl & Z", "F4", whatever, just a short keystroke command) and have that song copy to a temporary storage folder. I would do this across my collection, until I have about 500 songs in the temp folder. Then I would copy the contents of that folder to the mp3 player. Of course, I could highlight a song, hit "ctrl c", then toggle to the temp storage folder, and hit "ctrl v", then go back to the albums, but that would be really tedious & take forever. I hope I'm communicating this clearly. Anyone have an idea how I might accomplish this?

TIA

Fred

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi and welcome to SevenForums,
I have no idea how to do what you're asking for,
Sounds like a play list which is what I would use
Problem might be you'd need to be viewing the files in a media player and not in windows explorer.

 

[FredTastic]

Thanks for the reply. There used to be a utility in Windows, going back to 95 or 3.1, which would record a series of keystrokes/actions & replay them when you would press a pre-set key. I think I could get it to do this, but I can't even remember what it was CALLED, let alone if 7 has it

Gotta be a way to do this...

 

[Barman58]

I'd forget windows built in music support take a look at MediaMonkey » Free Media Jukebox, Music Manager, CD Ripper & Converter does all you want for free and is designed to organise the quantities you are dealing with

 

[RainoT]

ähm, what about using the "send to" command, or using the "copy to folder" right click tweak?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I may be able to help you as I have about 27,000 mp3s on my D drive, but only want about 1700 of them at any given time loaded onto a USB stick for car playback---these are my favorite 1700 songs out of the 27,000. I am constantly acquiring new songs and new favorites, so both D and the USB stick vary over time.

If you have ripped 3000 CDs, I am guessing you have a minimum of 3000 folders.

That presents a browsing problem. How can you browse 3000 folders containing 30,000 songs, looking for just 500 to put on an mp3 player? The mouse or keyboard clicks alone would be in the tens of thousands. I assume you'd need to eyeball the artist and title to decide if it's a member of the select 500.

I'd probably do a one-time copy of all 30,000 songs to a single folder. A copy, not a move.

That way I'd only have to scan the contents of one folder with my eyes. Just scroll down the folder of 30,000 songs and select the 500 you want to copy to the temp folder.

Any new CD rips can be copied to the 30,000 single folder or the 500 temp folder as desired.

There might be some other way to browse from 3,000 folders without driving yourself crazy, but I haven't come across it.

You'd need a way to copy all of your 30,000 songs into a single "flat" folder.

There's more than one way to do that, but the easiest I've found is to use the "Everything" search tool from voidtools.com.

You'd install it and then do a search for .flac, which would presumably bring up your list of 30,000 songs.

Highlight the entire list and right-click for copy. Then navigate to a suitable location and paste. All the files will be copied into the location FLAT into a single folder, without the folder structure used on the originals. Once that's done, just scroll this single folder and select what you want to copy to the select 500 folder.

Storing copies of 30,000 FLACs might take a few hundred GB. My 27,000 MP3s take up about 110 GB and I think FLACs are 2 to 3 times as large on average.

You might find it more useful in the long run to categorize your songs by genre and/or artist rather than album, but that's an individual organizational choice.