mp3 Woes: Finding a missing mp3

So I don't like to hunt for things manually. I especially don't like things that I can't just "Fire And Forget" when it comes to searching, so I wrote the following little script to hunt my hard drive for a particular file I wanted to find.

Because a search like this can take a while, and will basically just run in the background until either cancelled via Task Manager (look for wscript.exe), or it completes a scan of EVERY folder on your hard drive, I don't usually write things like this without starting and ending messages.

Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
StartingLoc = "C:\"
LookingFor = "String To Search For"

Sub Display_Fs(Folder)
For Each Subfolder in Folder.SubFolders

' Uncomment to display a popup message indicating where we are
'wscript.Echo "Getting: " & Subfolder.Path

' First, show the files in the local folder
    Set F = FSO.GetFolder(Subfolder.Path)
    Set FilesCollection = F.Files
For Each File in FilesCollection
    if File.Type = "MP3 Format Sound" then
        if InStr(file.name, LookingFor) > 0 then
            wscript.Echo file.path
        end if
    end if
Next

' Call the function so we dive into the current folder
    Display_Fs Subfolder
Next
End Sub

wscript.echo "Starting"

' Because the top folder is assumed to have no higher branch we can reference,
' we display the currenly sitting files first
Set F = FSO.GetFolder(StartingLoc)
Set FilesCollection = F.Files
For Each File in FilesCollection
if File.Type = "MP3 Format Sound" then
    wscript.Echo File.path
end if
Next

' Having displayed everything local, we begin our trip down the tree
Display_Fs FSO.GetFolder(StartingLoc)

wscript.echo "Ending"

mp3 Woes Part 1

I don't like things that are hard. I really don't.

I also don't like things that are manual. I mean, really. Shouldn't technology be all about making life easier, not adding layers of abstraction to manually processes? Shouldn't it get rid of the manual processes, and free us up to review log files and tweak the underlying processes?

Or have I been a DBA for too long? :)

So I wanted to rename a bunch of files. At once, automagically, but with some manual oversight. After all, I might come up with some files that I didn't know about, didn't like the renaming of, etc.

So here's what I came up with as requirements:

1. I want a script that will traverse all subdirectories
2. However, I have no interest in passing parameters (see above comment on "automatic"), so it needs to run starting in whatever directory it wakes up in
3. It should produce a text file that I can edit before running
4. It should not try to use iTunes API

So here's the full text of the script that I came up with, that satisfies these requirements.

' This script will recurse a directory tree, from the location the file is run from,
' and will produce a batch file to run that will automatically un-url-encode all files
' it runs into

Function ShowFileAccessInfo(filespec)
' This function will get the details of the file it's given
' and return the details as a formatted string, intended to be
' output to the report file later
Dim fso, f, myString
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set f = fso.GetFile(filespec)
myString = "REM Original File: " & f.Path & vbcrlf
myString = myString & "REM New Name: " & unescape(f.Name) & vbcrlf
myString = myString & "REM on Drive " & UCase(f.Drive) & vbcrlf
myString = myString & "REM Last Modified: " & f.DateLastModified & vbcrlf
myString = myString & "move "".\" & replace(f.Name, "%", "%%") & """ "".\" & unescape(f.Name) & """ "
myString = myString & vbcrlf & vbcrlf
ShowFileAccessInfo = myString
End Function


Function ShowFolderList(folderspec)
' This function takes a folder it's given, and loops through
' the collection of objects, calling the file describer
' function for each one
'
' At the end, it returns the formatted string back
' to the calling function

Dim fso, f, sf1, f1, fdc, fc, myString
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set f = fso.GetFolder(folderspec)
Set fc = f.Files
set fdc = f.SubFolders

' loop any found subdirectories
for each sf1 in fdc
myString = myString & ShowFolderList(sf1)
next

' loop any found files
For Each f1 in fc
myString = myString & ShowFileAccessInfo(f1)
Next

' because if you don't return what you find, this whole
' write it to disk thing is for naught...
ShowFolderList = myString

End Function



' so here we begin the main portion of the script
Const ForReading = 1, ForWriting = 2, ForAppending = 8
Const TristateUseDefault = -2, TristateTrue = -1, TristateFalse = 0
Dim fso, MyFile, FileName, TextLine
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

' Open the file for output.
FileName = ".\FileList.txt"
Set MyFile = fso.OpenTextFile(FileName, ForWriting, True)

' Write the result of the function directly to the file
MyFile.WriteLine showfolderlist(".")

' Because you have to close every door you open
MyFile.Close

mp3 Woes Introduction

So I downloaded some mp3 files of some speeches given in one of two languages - either English or Spanish. Unfortunately, the source of the files had URL-encoded the names of the files before putting them up on their server.

So, when I downloaded the files, it was into a directory in my iTunes folder. Then, I copied the files from my iTunes directory into c:\musicfiles, so I'd have a backup of the files to work against.

This left me with a folder structure like

c:\musicfiles\english
c:\musicfiles\spanish

The next article is going to show you how I wrote a quick little script to loop everything in a given directory and un-encode it.