Windows Command Prompt

I can get pretty OC when I'm in the mood. Since giving Jex his new Creative X-Fi2 for his birthday I've been trying to organize my music collection. Folder structure, filename formatting, album art - these are some things I've been thinking about in my quest for file organization.

For those who are curious, I use Mp3tag to modify the tags of my mp3 files. I used to use Helium Music Manager, but it was too bulky for my purposes, and buggy, too. I only wanted a tag editor and Helium was a full-featured music player and manager, so I uninstalled it.

I like how simple Mp3tag's interface is and how quick and easy it is to edit tags and rename files. Only recently did I discover that the explorer context menu can be enabled upon installation. Having a context menu in Windows explorer makes it so much easier to selectively manage your files, instead of waiting for a long time for your whole music library to load in Mp3tag.

The biggest issue I encountered was managing album art. It's not that difficult managing the album art using Mp3tag. You can set album art via files on your computer or from online sources, like Amazon. For some reason, though, even when I already manually set the album art of some files another image shows as the album art. And this same image is also what is displayed as the album art of other files. It was really annoying so I researched and found that I can get rid of the problem by deleting all the hidden image files, possibly, being referred to by the files for album art. Good, I like starting with a clean slate. So...how do I do that for each and every folder in my music collection without going crazy?

The answer: Google. Nah, actually the answer is the Windows command prompt. But Google was still part of how I created the solution because I suck at memorizing attribute syntax.

The Goal

Delete certain hidden files inside my music folder, as well as inside a lot of other folders found inside my music folder.

The Resolution Process

I found these two websites:

• http://techie-buzz.com/tips-and-tricks/recursively-delete-files-in-folders-and-sub-folders-using-command-prompt.html
• http://www.windows-commandline.com/2010/09/show-delete-hidden-files-command-prompt.html

I found the solution on how to delete files in a folder and its sub-folders in the first link. The second link helped figure out how I'll be able to delete hidden Windows files.

The Solution

del /A:H /S *.jpg

del is the basic deletion command in DOS. The /S directive solves the deletion of files from the folder and its sub-folders. The /A:H directive solves the deletion of hidden files. *.jpg specifies that all files with the extension of "jpg" will be deleted.

It's that simple. I just ran the command in my music folder and voilà! Goodbye pesky hidden album art files!