MP3 help needed

[susandennis]

Any of you PC people know of an easy way to organize your MP3 files according to playing time? I want to have folders of about an hour's worth of music each. What I want is a folder directory that shows me the plaing time of everything in that folder and then I can add or remove songs to get to about an hour.

I have a couple of programs that will play CD's and a program that sucks things off of CD's and turns them into MP3's and a program that writes stuff to CD's. And I can't figure out how to make any of these do what I want.

Anybody know of something or some way to do this easily?

Comments

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

I hope somebody has a better answer for you than this one. If I were going to try to do something like this, I would open winamp. You won't be able to see the playtime of everything in your mp3 folder, but you can drag and drop songs into winamp, and at the bottom it will show you a total play time.

I do this for housework. I will tell the girls we are going to clean for (example) half an hour, so I load up half an hour of songs on winamp, and we work til the music stops

[susandennis]

That is a PERFECT solution! Thanks!

And I love your house cleaning application.

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you!

[kyrielle]

Windows Media Player shows the playing time next to each track, as well. :)

If you're using Windows XP, you can even go in in the Explorer view, get 'details' view, right-click on any of the headings (such as Name or Size or Type), and select 'Duration'. This will add that column to the far right - showing the playing time.

[susandennis]

Yeah but I want something that takes those playing times and adds them all up. So if I put 3 2 minute songs into a folder, I'm looking for an Explorer kind of thing that shows me that the entire folder has 6 minutes worth of songs. (Yeah, I could get out the calculator and do it manually but that seems wrong!)

[kyrielle]

WMP will do that for playlists - move the songs into a playlist and it shows you the length of each track, and the length of the playlist (handy for if it's 4 minutes shy of what you want, to go find another track the right length).

I must concede that Windows explorer doesn't seem to be smart enough to summarize that in the status bar, which is a pity. Then again, moving things around in Explorer tends to confuse all the music programs that have stored library info anyway.

Try MusicMatch Jukebox

[geordie.livejournal.com]

Hit ctrl-D then tell it how long the playlist should be and use up to three matching criteria to set the base from which it works (album, genre, etc...) and it will build you a list of the appropriate length.

From what I've seen it's the best MP3 player, Winamp won't play my 'books on tape' (Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla on one MP3 CD to be precise) without excessive noise. I originally bought it for the ability to convert formats and it rips very well too. I always pay for shareware I rely on and youy need to in this case to get the high end features.

Re: Try MusicMatch Jukebox

[susandennis]

MusicMatch is one I don't have. Will check it out. Thanks!

Re: Try MusicMatch Jukebox

[(Anonymous)]

If the songs are sampled at the same rate (e.g,. 128kbps), could you just add up the file sizes for an hour-long CD you've created and use that as the total you're aiming for?(Windows explorer will show you the total if you select all -- the # is in the bottom left of the window)

For example, looking at some of my songs:

Susan's house 3,498kb = 3:43
Novocaine 2,950kb = 3:08
Not ready yet 4,482kb = 4:46

this works out to about 15.9kb per second, or 54Mb per hour.

-- jim c