Text file to list music

Making a text file to list music files

1. In Windows, make a note of the file path to the music directory (folder). By default, the path is typically C:\Users\DJ\Music, if you log in as "DJ". 

2. Open the Command window, e.g. by clicking on the magnifying glass symbol and searching for "Command", then clicking on "Command Prompt". 

3. Once in the Command window, navigate to C:\Users\DJ\Music. If the command prompt upon opening the window was C:\Users\DJ\, all you need to do is type "cd music", and the prompt should change to C:\Users\DJ\Music. Enter "cd.." to go up a level, and cd <subdirectory> to go down a level. ("cd.." is always the "parent" directory). 

 4. Now to create the list. In the next few lines, I'll separate the command to enter from its effect, with a hyphen. 

dir *.wav > filelist.txt - create a list of the .wav files in the directory in a file named "filelist.txt" 

dir /S *.wav > filelist.txt - create a list of the .wav files in the directory and any subdirectories in a file named "filelist.txt" 

dir /S *.mp3 >> filelist.txt - append a list of the .mp3 files in the directory and any subdirectories to the file named "filelist.txt" 

dir /? - to see a list of all the switches that can be used in the "dir" command. 

5. You can see how useful "dir" can be, and how easy it would be to adapt this method for other instances. Once you have a plain-text file, as opposed to a word-processed file with all its embedded style data, import to various applications becomes much simpler.