May 22, 2003
filed under:
One more nerd tip and that’s it
…I swear.
I have a gigantic music collection. My friend has an even more gigantic music collection, only his is backed up almost entirely on a 100GB external USB 2.0 drive. I happened to be assembling a computer at his house once when he walked over with the drive and said “Hey! You want some music?!” In a matter of minutes, I had effectively doubled my music collection.
But how does one keep track of so many mp3s? Everyone knows iTunes is the way to go if you’re on a Mac. It’s very simply the best MP3 player and cataloging program on earth. When Apple made their iPod for Windows last year, they had to consider which software to integrate. Either port iTunes to Windows, or find a decent company to partner with on the project. They ended up helping MusicMatch 7.1 to become a better product and give it some very effective MP3 tagging and ID3 lookup features. It can research, retag, and rename files in batches and on the fly. Pretty hot.
So I got that far, but what if I want a list of all my music? That’s a pain. We’ve all seen alternate explorers with features that may or may not help, but I don’t really want an explorer, nor do I want to pay for one.
PrintFolder 1.3 is a freeware program that does just what I wanted. Point this little 266k app at a directory and tell it what to list: subfolders, paths, files, dates, info… In a few seconds it created a complete text list of my almost 16 thousand mp3 files and folders.