When I’m at my desk for anything longer than just a couple of minutes, you can almost guarantee that there will be music playing. And it’s usually one of the many songs I copied from my constantly growing CD collection to my computer. It’s no wonder that the iPod and portable media players in general have taken off as they have. Using electronic copies is so much more convenient.

But when your collection grows it can make it quite to difficult to locate something specific. Unless you have a photographic memory, and if you do: lucky you! So when you hear only a part of song on the radio that you haven’t heard for awhile, and want to listen to the whole thing, how do you find it in your collection, if in fact you even have it?

At this point I should mention that I’m a bit of a renegade, and don’t have an iPod so I don’t use iTunes. I use an old freeware media player that doesn’t have fancy library functions like most of the new stuff does and I’m OK with that. My favorite player software works just fine for me in every other way, so I leave well enough alone.

Well you could start going through your cabinet, and if it’s anything like mine, you might find it eventually… Or you put Monarch to work for you!

It’s More Like Monarch for Fine Tunes

Start with creating a text list of your files (songs). This starts out very retro, in today’s Windows world. Go to the DOS prompt (Start, run command, or cmd). Switch over to the drive that has your songs, if necessary, and enter:

dir /s > myfiles.prn

When this completes, fire up Monarch and open myfiles.prn.

DOS produces a nice Monarch-friendly list, but depending on how you organize your files you may have song titles appearing in groups, separated by folder name. I use folders named by artist, then subfolders for album title, with only the songs for that album in that folder. It’s some sort of obsessive compulsive thing, I know. Oh well, a detail-oriented personality, right?

This sort of thing is right up Monarch’s alley. All of the individual file names become the detail lines (trap on the date, and specify a couple of blank traps where the <D characters appear on other lines in positions 25 and 26. Paint your field for the file names beginning in position 40. I went quite wide - 165 characters - to accommodate my longest file name.

Now add the folder as an append. I trapped using “directory of”, and painted the field from position 17 and went 127 wide.

That’s the heavy lifting done. Now for a little finesse. In the Table window, create a couple of calculated fields. Given that I use a fixed folder structure, I used this formula to extract the Artist name:

LSplit([ParentFolder],5,"\",4)

Then I used this similar formula to extract the Album name:

LSplit([ParentFolder],7,"\",5)

Then I took a couple of minutes to build summaries using Artist, Album and File Name as key fields, using count as the measure. This results in a nice, easy to read inventory report.

Finally, adding a runtime parameter field (SearchFor), that in turn is used in a filter formula (and saved as a separate model file), lets me look for songs that contain a certain word in the name:

Instr(SearchFor,[File Name])>0

All Play and No Work?

This whole exercise really only took a few minutes, and gave me a great tool for searching and managing my files. And while it was all in the name of fun, you can probably think up a way to apply at least some of this approach to something else.

If you’re lucky some great song might even inspire you to excel with Monarch.