Out of Sorts Searching for Your Music Files?

By Dick Killian, Las Vegas, Nevada


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45rpm This idea may help organize your folk dance music or video files. It is intended to help the novice or anyone trying to organize the clutter of dance music accumulating on his computer.

Your computer contains folders which, in turn, can hold files that may be located without using a program (such as Excel) AND with much more flexibility. One method is employing "tabs." The hyphen " - " (space hyphen space) may be inserted strategically to effect this handy solution. This enables truly efficient searches and multiple field sorting of your music or video files whether they be .mp3 files or .wav files and even the .avi files or .vob files used for video.

If your dance lists contain only the file designation such as .mp3 following a dance name or following just "Track Number" you can rename each file enabling this concept to create a very useful sortable data source. As in this case, there may be four fields (or more if you desire), each separated by (space) hyphen (space).

For example:

Galoppa - Italy - Bagnoli - 2009SC10.mp3

Khumkuma - Armenia - Bozigian - 2010L01.mp3

Sev Acherov Agcheek - Armenia - Bozigian - 2006EE12.mp3

Zonaradikos - Greece - Otterholt - 2009SC05.mp3

First, enter the dance name (space) hyphen (space), followed by the country or culture of origin (space) hyphen (space), then the teacher who presented the dance (space) hyphen (space), and lastly a code including the year, festival or workshop, and the sequence number in which it was presented; all of this in front of the (no space).mp3 file designation. Make sure you NEVER ERASE THE " . " DOT PRECEDING A FILE DESIGNATION!

In this example, a data base search in Windows Media for dances from Armenia would result in all dances from Armenia being displayed sorted alphabetically, along with all information on that line. A similar search for the teacher's name would result in alphabeticaly sorted dances by name. A search of the year/festival or workshop specifically (2010L) would display, in order, the sequence the dances were presented at that event.