h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've just put an MP3 player in my car and am in the process of making some compilation CDs to play in it.

A 700MB CD holds about 120 MP3s and I've got a folder which currently holds 2.1GB of MP3s - enough for 3 compilation CDs.

Problem is, I'd really like to mix these up so my CDs, on random play are pretty unpredictable. Is there any way of randomly sorting these MP3 files, so that I can quickly burn three CDs of random songs?

Currently I've got everything in one big folder (not sub-foldered), but if I arrange these files by track title, artist or by any other option given me by XP, they're not random. Suggestions?

B

Track title is fairly random, isn't it? Not in theory, but in effect. Other than that, I have no suggestions.

TRiG.

If you hit View > Choose Details, it'll give you more options to sort by. File size might be a good one. You'd get a collection of long songs and a collection of short songs. That may or may not suit you.

Or what about track number? All the track ones, all the track twos, etc. That might be good.

I still can't think of a truly random method. Do you have iTunes or Windows Media Player? Using either of those to burn the CD, instead of simple file transfer from one folder to another, may give you more options.

TRiG.

I've never done this, but what would happen if you deleted all information on all files? No artist, no song title, no year, no track number, no nothing. How would your XP arrange (or even arrnage) those files? Or would that only make Windows arrange the files by size?

But would it really be necessary to randomize the songs before you copy them to CD? Surely your MP3 player has a random playlist thingy?

Y.

My MP3 player does of course have a random lsiting, but I want 2.1GB of songs _randomly split_ between three CDs. It would be Anathema, for example, to have all the long songs on one CD or all the ZZ Top songs on CD3.

Sorting by Track Title would be too predictable, and Track Number wouldn't work, because I have a large number of untagged files among the MP3s, which effectively have no track number. As far as I know, Media Player won't split the files randomly between three disks: it can only cope with one at a time.

B

You don't say which program you're using to burn the CD. If you're using Windows' native CD burning tools I suspect you may be stuck. I can't think of any way to display files in a random order in Explorer.

However if you're using Nero, you can tracks from the playlists of some media players into its file selector. You would be able load all the files in the media player, shuffle the playlist, then select a wad of tracks and drag them into Nero.

I say "some media players" like I know of more than one that can do this. I have one (Foobar2000) that can; Windows Media Player 9 and WinAmp 5.1 can't.

If you haven't got Nero and/or a suitable media player... hmm, I can think of ways to do it, but I wouldn't categorise them under "quick".

I think you could make a little command line macro or somesuch to rename all the files, sticking random numbers on the front, but I'm guessing this is probably a bit much? Probably the same amount of effort as scrolling around and ctrl-clicking randomly until you've got a CD's worth of songs selected.

I don't know how XP's native burning utility works so can't help you there.

can you arrange a playlist in a random order? WMP doesn't seem to do it, but other media players may. from there, you can save the playlist and take the first third to one CD, the second third to another...

If you have iTunes, go to File > New Smart Playlist.

Make a condition that matches the songs you want and enable the checkbox that says "Limit to..." Enter 700 in the first field and change the first drop-down menu to 'MB'. Make sure the second drop-down menu is on 'random' and hit OK.

It should then give you 700MB worth of songs, randomly selected.

Now create another smart playlist and add the condition to match only where 'Playlist' 'is not' ''. This is to ensure that you don't get duplicate songs across CDs.

Create a third playlist in the same way, and add rules to all of the three playlists so that they do not select songs where they belong to any of the other two playlists.

Then simply go through each of these smart playlists in turn and click the Burn Disc button.

If you don't have iTunes then of course you could download it for free for the occasion. However, you might want to go to Preferences and then in the Advanced tab, under General, uncheck the box that says 'Copy files to iTunes Music folder when importing'. That way, you won't end up with a duplicate of 2.1GB of files! Then you can just go to File > Add to Library and select your directory of music.

Thank you, Baryonic Being, that was by far the most interesting and helpful information I have read so far this Sunday morning.

Y.

One I'm sure I would have used. Sadly, I went for Track Number instead as the lesser of all evils.

Sorry, BB. I ran out of patience.

B

IrfanView (free from http://www.irfanview.com/ ) was designed as an image manipulation package... but... it has some really cool (and simple) tools that can be applied to files of any format

The one I'm thinking of is 'batch rename'

You could sort your files by size or type or whatever in Windoze Explorer, drag a few at a time into a 'temporary' folder... batch rename them with some weird prefix, then repeat

You can choose where (which folder) to send the 'new' versions and whether or not to overwrite the original files

Because the code driving IrfanView is so well written, the renaming process is lightning fast - quicker than the human eye for even 1000 files at a time

And hey... you get a cool, free image package to boot

>>can you arrange a playlist in a random order? WMP doesn't seem to do it, but other media players may. from there, you can save the playlist and take the first third to one CD, the second third to another...<<

Windows Media Player does, if you go to the drop down menu from 'Now Playing', it has an option to 'Randomise'.