Copy all files including those within subdirectories

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Hi All

A friend has ripped a large cd collection on to his computer using Media Player. Media Player creates the files as

'artist/album/filename as specified in options.mp3' (or .wma)

Therefore each cd is contained within its own directory.

What he wants to do is get all of these mp3 files and have them in the root of a new hard drive (ie: no directories). Currently the only solution is to go into each directory in turn, select all then cut/paste to the new hard drive. This would be fine however he is a DJ and we are looking at over 15,000 songs across a few hundred CD's.

Is there a easy solution, maybe a way of using the DOS copy command that can copy all files including those within subdirectories?

Thanks for any help.

 

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Er - if this is windows then putting 15,000 files into one directory is a *bad* idea! The performance will be horrible!

And don't forget that it will need to be NTFS - AFAIK FAT won't take that many files in the root directory.

You would also need to take account of possible duplication of file-names. There are many examples of 'covers' in the recorded music industry.

XCOPY (a console command) can do the copying, but I don't think it will 'flatten' the tree.

Edit - a quick search in google came up with xxcopy, which *will* flatten a tree.

Edit: Oh - by the way - welcome to CF!

Harry.

 

why use dos? why not just do a search for *.mp3 in windows and copy the results to the intended location?

 

Thanks for the advice.

It didn't even occur to me to use Windows Search, that would be the easiest way by far. Xcopy was the closest I'd found but as mentioned it doesn't flatten the tree.

The filesystem is NTFS however I did not think about the file limit maybe simple A-Z folders for artist name will be the best solution. The main reason for having all the files in one directory is that duplicate files will produce the 'Replace File' dialog box whereas having each album in its own folder could allow a single song to exist any number of times dpending on how many albums the song appears on. This has caused problems where the DJ program stores a database of the songs available. Sorting by Artist name would still overcome this problem.

Thanks for the welcome. I'll say hello properly in the appropriate forum when I get a moment.

 

I would definetly go with that idea!

As Harry said, if you dump them all in the same folder it will cause you perfomance headaches.