I had a need to list out the contents of all the tracks on my MP3 player in a meaningful fashion. I thought that a third party solution would be the way to go but these all seemed to work on the tags of the files rather than the filenames themselves. This is ok if you keep these tags up-to-date but I don’t always bother.

The reason for this is that the iRiver iHP-140, being a hard disk player, looks and acts just like any other hard drive in Windows. So I have all my music arranged in the following format:

MUSIC\ARTIST\ALBUM\TRACK

This makes things wasy to find and navigate. What I needed was a way of listing this out and DOS has come to the rescue.

According to Microsoft DOS died a long time ago, however, you can still open a command prompt and run all your favourite DOS commands.

There is a useful command called Tree which will print out the structure of your folders on your hard driver from the current point and this was exactly what I needed to produce my list – and it was lightening fast.

A sample of the output is shown below:

+—The Doors
| \—The Best Of The Doors
| 01-Riders On The Storm.mp3
| 02-Light My Fire.mp3
| 03-Love Me Two Times.mp3
| 04-Roadhouse Blues (Live).mp3
| 05-Strange Days.mp3
| 06-Break On Through (To The Other Side).mp3
| 07-Five To One.mp3
| 08-Moonlight Drive.mp3
| 09-Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar).mp3
| 10-Love Her Madly.mp3
| 11-People Are Strange.mp3
| 12-Touch Me.mp3
| 13-Backdoor Man.mp3
| 14-The Unknown Soldier.mp3
| 15-L.A. Woman.mp3
| 16-Hello I Love You.mp3
| 17-The End.mp3
|
+—The Finn Brothers
| \—Everyone Is Here
| 01-Won’t Give In.mp3
| 02-Nothing Wrong With You.mp3
| 03-Anything Can Happen.mp3
| 04-Luckiest Man Alive.mp3
| 05-Homesick.mp3
| 06-Disembodied Voices.mp3
| 07-A Life Between Us.mp3
| 08-All God’s Children.mp3
| 09-Edible Flowers.mp3
| 10-All the Colours.mp3
| 11-Part of Me, Part of You.mp3
| 12-Gentle Hum.mp3

To produce something similar all you need do is:

 

  1. Open a command prompt
  2. Change directory to the root of where your music is held
  3. Enter the following command tree /a /f > tree.txt

You will now have a file called tree.txt with a complete listing of all your music.

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