So my fiancé and I DJed at her grandparent’s 50th anniversary party last night. I decided to rent CDJs instead of doing the whole turntables + Final Scratch thing, mainly because my needles are not well suited to dance floors (I found this out the hard way at the last party I DJed).
I wanted to print out a spreadsheet with all the tracks, indexed by their number on the CD, so we could easily find them. Here’s a quick way I came up with to build a numbered track list from a directory of MP3s.
You will need:
- Notepad
- Excel
- Your MP3s named in the format of “Artist – Track name”
Steps:
- Open a command prompt
- Go to the directory containing your MP3s (cddirectorywithmps)
- Type: dir /b > list.txt
- Open list.txt in notepad
- Search/replace “.mp3 ” with nothing
- Search/replace ” – ” with “,”
- Rename list.txt to list.csv
- Double-click it (it should open in Excel)
- Insert a column
- Type “=row()” in first row
- Click the bottom right of the cell and drag all the way to the last row. Screenshot of this:
(An alternative to steps 10 & 11 would be to turn on “Row & Column headings” under File -> Page Setup -> Sheet tab)
Voila! You should now have a spreadsheet with track number in column A, artist in column B, and track name in column C. Technically the first 7 or so steps could be built into a batch file if you needed to do this on a regular basis.
Note: if any of the track names had commas in them then will need to clean them up. Alternatively, you could replace ” – ” with a different delimiter in step 6, though then the process to load the data in Excel would change slightly.
Also note: be sure to do this after you’ve burned the CDs. Some CD burning software (i.e. Nero) has a different idea of “sort by name” than Windows! (apparently upper case M comes way before lower case M, 10 comes before 2, etc.)