Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

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chut7
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:11 am

Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

Post by chut7 »

I rate my MP3s in iTunes, then write the rating metadata onto the files themselves via Orzeszek Ratings https://www.orzeszek.org/dev/ratings/ . Windows Explorer can then show these ratings, and one can even write advanced search queries to pull out only my 5 star files.

My music library is pretty big...but I only want to back up the good stuff.

It doesn't look like the plugin architecture supports a custom file list, does it? Because if it could, I could query for my 5 star files, build a file list, then feed it into the plugin.

Or is there another way to do this that I'm not considering?

Adrian (Softland)
Posts: 1908
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2009 12:46 pm

Re: Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

Post by Adrian (Softland) »

Hi,

We cannot determine the files rating from the xml plugin used in Backup4all.

chut7
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:11 am

Re: Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

Post by chut7 »

How about the other suggestion, of providing a list of files to be backed up? That would be more universally useful.

Adrian (Softland)
Posts: 1908
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2009 12:46 pm

Re: Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

Post by Adrian (Softland) »

Hi,

You can back up those files without a plugin.
If you can see the 5 star files in Windows Explorer, just select them and use drag-and-drop to add them into the backup sources list (in Backup Properties->Sources) of a new backup job.

chut7
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:11 am

Re: Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

Post by chut7 »

Dragging and dropping would work, if this were a few dozen files. But this is probably a few hundred files, spread across dozens of directories. And I wouldn't want to manually do this every few months, since I add to my library and revise ratings all the time. Even Windows Search doesn't let me search by rating. But I could probably write a Powershell script that writes out a list of these files by parsing my iTunes.xml file, and if Backup4All had a way of importing that list as the list of files to be backed up, that would be ideal.

I can imagine other use cases - say someone wants to backup all files that have their name in the filename, but that this list continually changes. Or someone wants to back up files created only in the last month.

Creating such file lists is easy to do with a script, or even with some advanced DOS commands, but these use cases are not addressable (as far as I know) in Backup4All.

Adrian (Softland)
Posts: 1908
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2009 12:46 pm

Re: Backing up mp3 files of a certain rating

Post by Adrian (Softland) »

Hi,

Backing up a give list of files is not possible at this moment, with Backup4all.

As for the other cases you mention, there is a solution in Backup4all: to use filters.
You can use filters to include or exclude files containing a given name, you can also filter them by date and so on.

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