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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 12:22 pm 
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I sometimes have fun just figuring out how to make my computer do what I want it to do. LOL

I recently discovered that some of my music collection had disappeared! Odd tracks of various albums were gone, and in one case a whole album. I looked at my backups and they were there. I have a feeling it has to do with Groove Music.

Anyway, I went through all of my nearly 500 artist folders in my Music folder and compared their size to the one on the backup drive. (My music collection on my computer is around 78 GBs.) I dug down and fixed where there were discrepancies. I compared the size on my hard drive, the size on my external backup drive, what I had on OneDrive, and what was on the SD card on my phone. (Got a 200 GB SD card for my phone so I could put all of my music on it.)

When all was compared and equal, I decided I wanted to make a spreadsheet of all the folders and their sizes. How to do this?

Well OneNote has a fabulous feature wherein you can pull the text out of a picture. I went through Windows Explorer and grabbed screen shots of all the folders and pasted them into OneNote. Then I had OneNote grab the text from each of the screen shots. It gave a long list of all the folders in the screen shot. I then pasted these into Excel, where they pasted a single folder name per row. (Very nice!) All I had to do in terms of hand data entry was to then type in the size of the folders, which I had written on a printout of the screen shots.

I can now edit the collection when I add new music, and should anything appear corrupted or missing in the future, I can more easily track it down.

What was fun was the satisfaction of being able to do it. :)

Looks like so:
Attachment:
Folder sizes.jpg
Folder sizes.jpg [ 94.73 KiB | Viewed 5098 times ]

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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 6:30 pm 
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Such things can be fun and often lead to more fun. :) In your case, and mine below, it makes the system more fun as it is easier to handle.

I do a similar thing with my movies with Excel. I set up a sheet with columns set up by genre to a point. There is drama, sports, animated, etc.. I put a new movie in its genre alphabetically and set the entry as a link to the movie location on my 4TB internal media drive. I click a title and it plays.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:38 pm 
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Very nice!

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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:56 pm 
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As far as the linking it is really simple in Excel. Try right clicking on one of the albums in your Excel sheet and selecting Hyperlink. Now just navigate to the physical location of the album and set. After setting just clicking on the album SHOULD launch your default music player and take off. I said "SHOULD" as it is possible that you may need to actually select one of the audio files within the album for the hyperlink. Even if that is the case your player settings should take over as to play straight through or shuffle within the album.

Of course, in my case, I am dealing with DVD format files. I set my file associations to open the DVD launcher (VIDEO_TS.INF) to open with my default video player. When I navigate to set my hyperlink I just point the thing to the VIDEO_TS.INF file for the selected DVD. It works slick as can be.

If you have play lists you should also be able to add them to your Excel sheet.

I would NEVER claim to be a pro with Excel but I do fairly well. If any of this is of interest let me know and I might be able to help set things up.

<edit>
I just tried what I said and all is cool with adding playlists to your Excel sheet but not so much with linking directly to an album. When linking to an album it WILL open the default player with that specific album selected but you would then need to select and launch. If the hyperlink is pointed directly to an audio file it WILL play that file when clicked but will not continue with other titles. Could possibly get around this aspect but can't promise. Would also need to know that it is of interest... :mrgreen:

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 12:11 am 
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It would be a "cool" thing, but I'm very happy with the Zune software. It's very easy for me to find what I want. And those are simply artist folders. There are twice as many album folders (nearly a thousand). Using Excel to launch them just isn't practical. And titles of albums, particularly classical ones, are a very cumbersome type of data to sort and control by. Individual tracks are even more cumbersome - well over 7000.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 10:27 am 
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Not surprised at what you did with one note. It is a powerful amazing tool, that saves my business all kinds of time, and I haven't even scratched the surface


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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 12:55 pm 
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Indeed. Along with Outlook and Money Home and Business, OneNote is one of my major business tools.

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