Edgar Francis Musgrove, V
I have been trying to teach myself Visual Basic using Microsoft Vista Ultimate 64-bit, Visual Studio 2008 Visual Basic.
My first program, RenameSongs, asks for a target folder then inspects it for a text file called titles.txt. If found, it opens the text file and counts the
number of .m4a (MP4 music) files in the folder. If the text file has the same number of titles as tracks in the folder, it renames the files to match the track names.
Unfortunately, there are a few illegal characters where file/folder names are concerned. The program has provisions for replacing invalid characters as
designated by the user. This works great for the song titles which are not identified via online databases!
You may download the project and all source code here:
RenameSongs4.zip
My second task, Tag2File, was a bit more daunting! The actual .m4a file contains the complete song title but the file often has a truncated/abbreviated name, this is
displeasing to my perfectionist eye! I wrote a second program which, when pointed at a folder, looks at every .m4a file within it (and all sub-folders it
contains), reads the song name from the file then renames the file appropriately (given that the file system I use may contain very long names) and
replacing any invalid characters as the user specifies. This required three fairly difficult (for this beginner) sub-tasks—one was to recursively inspect all sub-directories, an
other was to parse the meta-data in an MP4 (.m4a) file, the third was to figure out how to pull 2-byte Unicode characters out of a binary stream.
You may download the project and all source code here:
tag2file3.zip
My system:
Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard with Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 GHz FSB1333 CPU; 2 x OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 4GB Kit = 8 GB ram; SAPPHIRE HD3870 graphics card; ViewSonic's 28" widescreen LCD monitor;
2x Western Digital WD3000GLFS 300GB 10kRPM in RAID1 (mirror) as C drive (SATA), 2x Western Digital WD7500AYYS 750GB 7500 RPM in RAID1 as data storage (SATA),
1 Western Digital WD1600YS 160GB 7500 RPM as MS Window's Complete PC backup storage (SATA), 2x Western Digital WDH1CS10000 1TeraByte My Book™ Home Edition
as music storage and backup (eSATA); LITE-ON|iHAS120-04 20X DVD burner (SATA); CRW-UINB SABRENT 52 in 1 card reader & writer
in a VA8003BWS ThermalTake Armor Black Full Tower case with W0132RU Thermaltake Toughpower 1000w PSU.
email me
Last modified 22 January 2009.