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I recently had a harddrive crash, and upon recovering it all directories were lost. I now have a bunch of random DIR's (DIR001 to DIRn) with a ton of MP3's, not necessarily one album per folder. I also have an old copy of the same music (but less of it).

What is the best way to organize this again. I don't care so much about having it all nicely in proper folder structures, as long as it's easily searchable (itunes, winamp library style). The biggest problem is that I don't want duplicated in there.

I want all of my MP3 files out of the generic folders, and either into one big folder or in folders per artist/album.

Tips?

HannesFostie
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1 Answers1

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What operating system are you running?

If you're using Windows Vista/7, you could use the integrated search bar in Windows Explorer to search for all your mp3 files...

Open the root folder which contains your "DIR00x" folders; here, type in *.mp3 in the search box at the top and wait for it to search through the folders.

Once you have a list of mp3 files, you can select all of them and then cut and paste them into your "My Music" folder. Now, copy all of the files from your original music folder to the same "My Music" folder.

If you're lucky, you'll start getting prompts asking wether or not to overwrite the files; check the "no to all" checkbox and click on keep original files.

Now, open up iTunes/Windows Media Player or any other program you'll be using, and import the My Music folder.

If you have any more duplicates, most media players have a "delete duplicates" option... iTunes does for sure. If this doesn't catch all of them, take your time and delete duplicates along the way as you start seeing them.

Good luck!

akseli
  • 4,173