File listing help

July 21, 2006 8:58 AM

How can I easily get all the music files on my computer listed on to an excel spreadsheet?

I'm simply (and I hope it's simply) trying to get a list of all my music onto an excel sheet (and they are mostly mp3 files).

posted by Todd Lokken to computers & internet (9 answers total)

iTunes will export your library as a CSV file that you can open with Excel and then save as a spreadsheet.
posted by camcgee at 9:08 AM on July 21, 2006

Import everything into itunes.

'Export song list' using PlainText.
(this will export all your data and separate colums by tabs, which is how excel separates colums as well)

Import (or copy and paste) the file into excel.
posted by psyward at 9:10 AM on July 21, 2006

If you aren't using iTunes or don't have some other program that maintains a list to export, and if you have them all in the same directory, you could use a dos-like command

- Got to Start > Run
- Type cmd.exe and hit enter
- Use the cd command to navigage to that directory
- Type dir /b >filename.csv
- The dir will list all the files in that directory, the /b will strip away the file path, and the >filename.csv (where "filename" is whatever you want to call it)
-Then open the file in excel and manipulate to your heart's content
posted by kookoobirdz at 9:17 AM on July 21, 2006

assuming windows, this is my low-tech solution...

Open a command line and navigate to your base music folder
dir /b /s > dir.txt
This command will save a list of all files in this folder. the /b indicates bare format, which removes the extra file info and the /s makes it include all sub-dirs. This list will be saved to dir.txt in your base music folder.

This is now easy to paste or import into a spreadsheet. The only possible downside is that you get the full path + filename, though that might be alright depending on your intended use.

Also, this doesn't give you any useful metadata, like the tags on your files.
posted by utsutsu at 9:19 AM on July 21, 2006

Blast! What kookoobirdz said.

Today is no-preview-day, didn't anyone tell you?
posted by utsutsu at 9:20 AM on July 21, 2006

The /s tag is a helpful improvement, brother (sister)
posted by kookoobirdz at 9:21 AM on July 21, 2006

If Excel can import text, use that instead of CSV. For CSV you'd have to worry about quoting things if the filenames include commas, or individual file names would end up getting split.

I'd probably do this like:

perl -MFile::Find -e 'find(sub {/(mp3|ogg|flac)$/ && print "$_\n" }, "/"' > files.txt

but, then, I'd probably be doing it on Linux with Perl installed.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 11:28 AM on July 21, 2006

If you want to list the contents with full paths, you can use dir as stated earlier, but with the *.mp3 wild card:
dir /B /S *.mp3

Which will list a nice, clean list of the full path and name of the file, and of course you can use > MyMp3s.txt at the end to send directly to a txt file and not the screen. However if you want just the file names and no path, you can use the for /R command as below, replacing e:\itunes\ with your music root
for /R e:\itunes\ %i in (*.mp3) DO @echo %~ni

The for /R will walk a directory path and "for each file" do a thing; the in (*.mp3) element limits it to mp3 files, and the %~ni will take the resulting file path and strip it to name (~n) only. This way, you'll cleanly get only the file names and no full paths like with the dir.

You can also make a .csv that excel will happily consume as a comma-delimited file showing different elements of the file, which when opened in excel will be nicely separated into columns such as directory, filename, size, and date/time for easy viewing, such as this:

for /R e:\itunes %i in (*.mp3) DO @echo %~di%~pi,%~ni,%~zi,%~ti > c:\mymp3s.csv

Output:


e:\ITUNES\Ben Folds\Ben Folds Live\,04 Best Imitation Of Myself,4644700,08/07/20
04 12:37 AM
e:\ITUNES\Ben Folds\Ben Folds Live\,05 Not The Same,6509204,08/07/2004 12:37 AM
e:\ITUNES\Ben Folds\Ben Folds Live\,07 One Down,5844645,08/07/2004 12:38 AM
e:\ITUNES\Ben Folds\Ben Folds Live\,08 Fred Jones Part 2,6722995,08/07/2004 12:3
9 AM
e:\ITUNES\Ben Folds\Ben Folds Live\,09 Brick,6850269,08/07/2004 12:40 AM


posted by hincandenza at 12:26 PM on July 21, 2006

Aw... c'mon, that's gotta get a flag for best answer! :)
posted by hincandenza at 11:06 PM on July 21, 2006