How am I to place 40000 filenames in a .txt?

Dear informed Doper,

I’m facing a difficult chore. There are some 40000+ mp3 files on my hard drive, and I’d like to have them listed in a way that doesn’t require hundreds of gigabytes of space.
Is there a program that can write down all filenames from a particular directory in a particular text document?
Even better, is there a program that can write down selected properties of files by their names?

Legal disclaimer: All of the aforementioned mp3 files are recordings of me singing under the shower. There is absolutely no pirated content on my computer. Really. I take frequent showers and like to sing non-copyrighted material during them. You believe me, don’t you?

for a particular directory, under windows…

launch a command prompt. (under XP, this is best done typing ‘cmd’ in the start menu run box.)

cd \whatever directory\subfolder\etcetera

dir /B > list.txt

That will create a file called list.txt in the c:\whatever directory\subfolder\etcetera directory, containing the names of all files inside it.

there are other useful dir options in the command prompt that will let you create lists of files inside subfolders matching a file name extension, etcetera. dir /? will give you TFM

:smiley:

Hope that this helps.

You might want to use a filename template in there as well, something like:
dir *.mp3 /B > list.txt

Otherwise all those other perfectly legal files such as DVD rips of your summer vacation will be listed too.

Your web browser will list the contents of folders for you.
Just drag the folder into an open browser tab (Mac), and the program will display a list of links to the files, along with info on their type, how big they are, etc.
Save the page as a text file, and open it in a spreadsheet or word processor for clean up.

You can export your Winamp playlist as a text file. I know this as people used to put their list on the internet for no reason at all; caused me no end of annoyance years ago trying to look up actual mp3s and just finding stupid lists everywhere.

Winamp can display certain mp3 properties… it might be possible to get it to put those in the file with the name.

I feel its worth mentioning using Itunes to do this.

It’s free and can consolidate all your music across your computer into one specific place. Even if you don’t want to do that once its scanned your computer for all music you can export a list detailing all your music (file -> export).

The file it produces can be opened with a spreadsheet and lists everything including size and file location.

Other Information listed includes:
Name Artist Composer Album Grouping Genre Size Time Disc Number Disc Count Track Number Track Count Year Date Modified Date Added Bit Rate Sample Rate Volume Adjustment Kind Equalizer Comments Play Count Last Played Skip Count Last Skipped My Rating Location