M3U contents into one place?

Pawnless Endgame · 11 Jul 2011 at 22:48

Okies. I've made numerous Winamp playlists over the years, with content often in different directories. I want to mine the MP3s out and copy them into a single temporary folder for dumping onto an MP3 player. It would save me a lot of time instead of having to pick them out from ~15 different directories. Since an M3U is plain text, I went into it and saw that it's just the path of each MP3. So I placed "copy" before each line and "F:\" after each line, saved it as a bat file to see if the whole list copied to F but no joy. I think it's the long file names that have thrown DOS. (running Win 7 with DOS in command prompt)

Any ideas?

Cheers.

ChrisD. · 11 Jul 2011 at 22:53

Just use Powershell.

ChrisD. · 11 Jul 2011 at 22:55

GET-CHILDITEM D:\music –include *.mp3 recurse

Long time since I used it, but I think that should work.

ChrisD. · 11 Jul 2011 at 23:12

I might be chatting crap though!

Pawnless Endgame · 11 Jul 2011 at 23:20

Thanks both of you :-)

Milano, I think your line fetches MP3s from the chosen directory and subdirectories, where I was looking to dig inside an M3U.

For now though, I have placed quotes around each long filename and this seemed to have done the trick.

CaptainCrash · 11 Jul 2011 at 23:57

Monserrat said:
Any ideas?

I guess you've successfully done the deed now, but if you use foobar2000, you don't need to mess around editing the m3u files - just drag all your m3u playlists into it, then Edit\select all (or manually select what you want) > right-click > File Operations > Copy to > enter name of your destination folder (or browse to it). "File name pattern" is just "%filename%" (without quotes), which will copy the files into a single folder without recreating the paths, which is presumably what you need.

Pawnless Endgame · 12 Jul 2011 at 00:01

Ahhhh thanks Captain Crash! Sure, I did it successfully tonight, but this is something that I'll do over and over again as I wipe my MP3 player and change playlists / styles of music. Therefore I will definitely go for the Foobar2000 method.