Every now and then I do a project which involves a lot of file management. One was needing to sift through a progressive backup that consisted of 400k images grouped into small collections, and I had to find duplicate backups of those collections that may or may not have slightly altered directory names. A task that would have been impossible without ultrasearch thanks to ultrasearch's unique way of saving the drives ToC to ram so repeated searches are instant.
Months ago I copied my large anime fansub collection from a very large number of DVDs to a pair of usb HDs to create an online collection of them, a process that was lengthy but shorter because of another small utility I found that would do a blind copy of every dvd I loaded. Having all the series on Hard drives was just one step though, I wanted it to be accessible from any device I wanted. Samba shares were adequate for local sharing, but chromecast TV's still required a pc to play to. I also knew if I wanted to access it online I would need something to transcode to lower bitrates. At this point my options shrunk considerably.
I would need to enlist the help of a media server (in this case, plex), but media servers generally need to be able to scan the files and organize it themselves. This was my problem, if you don't know much about fansubs then here is a look at what file names tend to look like, "[UTW]_Kara_no_Kyoukai_-_Mirai_Fukuin_[BD][h264-1080p_FLAC][76F03FE0].mkv" . That would drive any file scanner insane. Also that is a movie, so each episode in a series would have a number in there, too. So it came down to how I was going to be able to sanitise literally 5000+ file names. 5000+ files that needed underscores converted back to spaces, fansub group name removed from the front(and sometimes back), and all the misc info like format and crc codes stripped while not touching the episode number. After a little looking around one of the searches at the top was http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/ . Now as one who has been on the interwebs a while, you usually avoid sites that a) have the program name in the domain name, and b) sites that look like they were written in notepad, 10 years ago. Still, I did some searches on it and found it was a REAL program on many big software mirror sites.
The rest is history, 6 hours later I had renamed all my files in over 300 directories, and this morning I have been slowly feeding them to plex with very little problem aside from some manual intervention to find the right metadata (HAMA + Absolute Series Scanner). The amount of time and headache this free program has saved me is, well this project probably wouldn't have been possible. ^^
Months ago I copied my large anime fansub collection from a very large number of DVDs to a pair of usb HDs to create an online collection of them, a process that was lengthy but shorter because of another small utility I found that would do a blind copy of every dvd I loaded. Having all the series on Hard drives was just one step though, I wanted it to be accessible from any device I wanted. Samba shares were adequate for local sharing, but chromecast TV's still required a pc to play to. I also knew if I wanted to access it online I would need something to transcode to lower bitrates. At this point my options shrunk considerably.
I would need to enlist the help of a media server (in this case, plex), but media servers generally need to be able to scan the files and organize it themselves. This was my problem, if you don't know much about fansubs then here is a look at what file names tend to look like, "[UTW]_Kara_no_Kyoukai_-_Mirai_Fukuin_[BD][h264-1080p_FLAC][76F03FE0].mkv" . That would drive any file scanner insane. Also that is a movie, so each episode in a series would have a number in there, too. So it came down to how I was going to be able to sanitise literally 5000+ file names. 5000+ files that needed underscores converted back to spaces, fansub group name removed from the front(and sometimes back), and all the misc info like format and crc codes stripped while not touching the episode number. After a little looking around one of the searches at the top was http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/ . Now as one who has been on the interwebs a while, you usually avoid sites that a) have the program name in the domain name, and b) sites that look like they were written in notepad, 10 years ago. Still, I did some searches on it and found it was a REAL program on many big software mirror sites.
The rest is history, 6 hours later I had renamed all my files in over 300 directories, and this morning I have been slowly feeding them to plex with very little problem aside from some manual intervention to find the right metadata (HAMA + Absolute Series Scanner). The amount of time and headache this free program has saved me is, well this project probably wouldn't have been possible. ^^
