Indexing MP3 CDs for DJing

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:

1. Open a command prompt
2. Go to the directory containing your MP3s (cd\directory\with\mps)
3. Type: dir /b > list.txt
4. Open list.txt in notepad
5. Search/replace ".mp3 " with nothing
6. Search/replace " - " with ","
7. Rename list.txt to list.csv
8. Double-click it (it should open in Excel)
9. Insert a column
10. Type "=row()" in first row
    
11. 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.)