Ripping .txt files from archive DVDs

June 14, 2005 4:13 PM

I'm a collecter live music, all in various lossless formats (FLAC, SHN, etc..) As a result of being lossless audio, the sets are quite large, ranging from 300MB all the way up to a couple of GB. Archiving to hard disc is not an option for me at this point, so I currently archive to DVD. I use Advanced Disk Catalog to keep track of where everything is at. However, it's a real pain in the ass to have to pull the disc out of the archive just to check a single text file for source or location information when I'm trading. Are there any apps on the market that would do this automagically for me? What I envision is inserting the disc with the program open - It creates the subfolders that exist on the disc and automatically grabs ANY text files on said disc and copies them into the cooresponding subfolder it just created. Nothin' more, nothin' less. Also, free is good. Any ideas out there in AskMeFiland?
posted by rabble to computers & internet (13 comments total)

No, but you should be able to write your own program, or get a programmer friend to do it. This would be a ten-line program.
posted by ori at 4:39 PM on June 14, 2005

nevermind. window's xcopy function can do this.

create a file on your desktop called DVDTextCopy.bat
open the file in notepad and paste these two lines:

@echo off
xcopy /S /I d:\*.txt c:\music\music_cd

replace d: with whatever drive letter your DVD drive is, and c:\music\music_cd with wherever you want the DVD structure with text files to be replicated. after you are done, you will have to manually rename the folder "music_cd" to a specific name for the DVD you just inserted.

if you want it to copy any other type of files, just add another line with whatever file type you want. for example:

@echo off
xcopy /S /I d:\*.txt c:\music\music_cd
xcopy /S /I d:\*.nfo c:\music\music_cd

rough, but it works. also, make sure the file is .bat, not .bat.txt (if you save it in notepad it will sometime append the .txt extension, which will be invisible if you have file extensions turned off.)

that way you can insert your DVD, double-click on "DVDTextCopy", and it'll do what you want. if you play around with other shell commands you can probably get it to ask you to specify the name of the destination directory.

if you want to understand what's going on, go to start->run, type cmd, click run, and type "xcopy /?".
posted by ori at 4:52 PM on June 14, 2005

Will that work recursively through subdirectories? I'd really like the ability to create a clone of the directory structure (minus contents), and dump the txt files from the original subdir to the cloned one on hard disc. This is only because alot of the info files are generically named info.txt, and I don't want to consantly deal with "OK to overwrite?" prompts..
posted by rabble at 5:05 PM on June 14, 2005

Wow, nevermind, that did EXACTLY what I was looking for..

Thanks, ori!
posted by rabble at 6:00 PM on June 14, 2005

Wonderful tip ori!
posted by odinsdream at 7:54 PM on June 14, 2005

I am sure glad we still have DOS. It is quite powerful for these types of tasks.

So rabble, if I may ask, now that easytree and sharing the groove have bit the dust, where might one, theoretically, obtain such live shows (excluding etree)?
posted by caddis at 9:16 PM on June 14, 2005

dimeadozen.org of course...
posted by schyler523 at 11:50 PM on June 14, 2005

What schyler523 said. If you've ever been to easytree, dimeadozen may look a little...err... familiar.

Also, although their selection isn't as great as DaD (yet), I've grown to love the community over at The Trader's Den.

Then of course there's the ever popular bt.etree.org, BootCity, and DigitalBoots.

At this point and time, dimeadozen is the ranking king, although their standards aren't quite as high as alot of the other sites. You'll find alot of shows there with incomplete lineage, weird file names, etc.. But it's more than worth it to wade through all of that for the sheer variety of music they've got.
posted by rabble at 1:21 AM on June 15, 2005

And for those who are interested, my modified for lossless audio purposes coding looks like this:

@echo off
xcopy /S /I d:\*.txt c:\bootext
xcopy /S /I d:\*.ffp c:\bootext
xcopy /S /I d:\*.md5 c:\bootext
xcopy /S /I d:\*.jpg c:\bootext
xcopy /S /I d:\*.gif c:\bootext

That grabs all text files, ffps (fuzzy fingerprints, basically an md5 that is specific to FLAC files), md5s, and all artwork (if included) - Rebuilds the directory structure, and inserts the files into the correct subdirectories. Absofrigginglutely perfect.
posted by rabble at 1:26 AM on June 15, 2005

Just curious, why do you need two types of fingerprints for the file? md5 works no matter what the file contains, so what's the point?
posted by odinsdream at 3:31 PM on June 15, 2005

If you want the script to input the title of the DVD, and name the new directory accordingly:

@echo off
set /P newdir=Title of DVD:
xcopy /S /I d:\*.txt "c:\%newdir%"
xcopy /S /I d:\*.ffp "c:\%newdir%"
xcopy /S /I d:\*.md5 "c:\%newdir%"
xcopy /S /I d:\*.jpg "c:\%newdir%"
xcopy /S /I d:\*.gif "c:\%newdir%"
xcopy /S /I d:\*.txt "c:\%newdir%"
posted by ori at 6:47 PM on June 15, 2005

OMFG - the old login even works there. Thanks.
posted by caddis at 10:31 PM on June 17, 2005

odinsdream said:
Just curious, why do you need two types of fingerprints for the file? md5 works no matter what the file contains, so what's the point?

FFPs (Fuzzy fingerprints) serve the same function as an md5, just using a different method. It is used to verify against an internal checksum stored in the file itself, rather than generating checksums for the files themselves. So now I can change the compression ratio, rename the files, etc., and as long as the resulting uncompressed .wav would be the same, these files will verify. It's like md5 with some flexibility.
posted by rabble at 11:49 AM on June 18, 2005