Random Copy

When I hear music with my mp3 player, I often miss something: it is the surprise you have when a radio plays a song which you not know in the playlist before, and its the variety you have in radio music instead hearing a whole album of an artist. After some titles of a artist its getting boring. So I wrote this tiny little program which does only one thing: Copy a bunch of files out of a bigger collection to your mp3 player. The difference to your shuffle function of the mp3 player is, that this works only, in the files you have on the player: When you have a player with flash memory, the available memory is limited to some gigabytes. But this program can mix files from your entire hard disc, which could be much bigger than the memory of your mp3 player.

Later I used the program to deal with some difficulties of a new Player and other People asked me about the possibility to create collections for burning on CD for their Car. So it now have some modes.

So it works. You have only to do some simple tasks:

Select in the right Explorer the target drive
Set up the maximum file size for your mp3 player (in Megabytes) or if you use it to create CD Images the size of the input files you want to burn (for example 2000 mb will create 3 normal CD Images.
Set up the filter off files. A filter is a wildcard like "*.mp3" you can use several filters by separating them with an semicolon e.g.: "*.mp3;*.mp4;*.wma"
Select one or more directories in the left explorer from which you want to have music. You can add an directory simply by double-clicking on it. You can do it also by clicking on the add button and you can delete it with selecting it in the list box, which appears and press on the delete button.
After you have finished it you can start the Search of files by clicking on the Search button in the main window or in the directory list window.
Now you see another window. It contains after a short time a list randomly created by the computer of files in this folders and their subfolders. When the folders have not enough files, to fill your space they will contain all files matching your filter.
You once again can delete one or more files by first marking a file in the list and then clicking on delete. Or you can rescan to get a complete new list. You can also delete the whole list.
Then the copy process starts. The files will be copied to your device, without the dirs. Files which makes problems (not enough space on the device, or filenames which are already exists) will not deleted from the list. All other copied files will vanish from the list. The caption of the forms informs you about the progress.

The Modes

The normal Mode will copy the files in random number to your player. This is the default if your Player plays them as they are stored on it.

For MP3 Player, which are sorting the list either after date or filename you can check two options: A random file name will rename the file on your mp3 player. It appends a 4 digit leading random number. The Tags in the file are not affected so you can see the title and artist from the tags. A new file date will change the creation date to the time it was stored on the mp3 player. Both options will result that the mp3 player neither can resort the titles after tittles or creation date back to the original order in the album.

My latest mp3 player has another bug, for which is the next mode. It plays a album complete, but then again and does not use the next album. So for that the next Mode "Filename starts with sequence number". Also you get a leading 4 digit Code but it is counted upwards. To get all titles of your wished album you only should select albums which fit on the memory.

Another easy Mode for getting a new Filename, especially when you mix Files form various artists is to create a new filename if you simply switch the artist and title field. This is done by the next mode. It creates a new file name with leading song name followed by artist (read out from the mp3-tags)

CD-Mode

I got the Question that it is also possible to implement a CD Mode. You enable it by Checking the "CD image Mode" Checkbox. In this Mode the right Box is active, where you can select the Size of the CD. In this Mode your selected Dir on the Target side must contain Subdirs, at least one. If there are none they are made (name "CD1, CD2"...). The number of created subdirs is so Chosen, that they are all filled. So files could be remaining after the Copy Task. The purpose is to create some CD Images from your Music collection without have a file more than once in the CD-Collection. You can fill the subdirs before using randomcopy, I preferred using existing subdirs to avoid

After finishing you have in the Subdirs a collection of music which you can burn with a program. I recommend CDBurnerXP (despite of its name, the program also runs under Windows Vista and 7).

Wave Mode

A special upgrade of the CD-Mode is the Wave Mode. Instead of copying MP3 on a CD they are converted to Waves and then copied to the Subdirs of the Directory (you must have more than one! - now they are not made, because of the large file size of waves this should result in creating a lot of dirs and a very time consuming task if you chosen a too large base of compressed files) This allows you to create Audio-CD's you can play with every CD-Player. Since it is much harder to fill a CD with Waves files because of their size the mechanism of Copying is a little bit different. The list of mp3's is sorted after file size and randomcopy copies the longest files first. The routine stops, when a file is bigger than remaining space of the chosen CD-Format in all subdirs.

For converting the Files the bass.dll must be in the program directory. It is included in the package. The bass.dll can convert many mp3 files, but certain files with coding errors or special features can not converted. After finishing you can burn the CD with CDBurnerXP.

Since first every mp3 file must converted in a wave file. Using this mode needs much more time to copy the files.

Other Things

You can check on a new Version and see this help with clicking on the "Help" button.

There is the possibility to check duplicates. This is useful if you copy a discography of a group and the group has recorded many times on different albums a song or a remix. If you check "Eliminate duplicates" only files with different filenames and different titles are copied. But this won't work if the song once is "I love you" and "I love you (remix)" sind this are different song titles.

Hint: In FAT File Systems of SD-Cards and many Players (which I use) you can store only 64 Files in the Root Dir. For Copying more Files you must create a Sub-Folder in the Root Directory and copy the files in this Folder. You get a Hint when you try to copy more than 64 Files in the Root dir. This works only if the Media is connected as a separate Drive (you also can assign a Media with a Path, then it is regarded as a Directory and this Warning will not appear. However the limitation is still there).

Download Random Copy

If you like the program you can donate via paypal.

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