How in the Tech

Fill a Thumbdrive with Random Files (or MP3s)

By Adam Myers ⋅ October 28, 2008 ⋅ Tags: File Management

As a long standing member of the Apple iPod cult I can’t really relate to the problem I am about to speak to. Each morning, I sync my iPod to iTunes to grab the latest podcasts and any new music added to the library. Like most, I also have a number of smart play lists that are updated and synced – the most used being a weighted random shuffle based on ratings that provides about 8 hours worth of music. This works great for me and since I’m resisted to change, it’s been this way for years. My wife, on the other hand, hasn’t made the iPod jump with me. Instead, she still uses an old RCA branded flash-based MP3 player which continues to work well for her. The problem comes to light when she wants to replace the 1GB of music on the player with a random mix of tunes from our combined music library. It’s a time consuming process because of the underlying filesystem structure of an iTunes Music Library and the amount of music in the library itself.

Then I found Mix2Stix, whose main function is to take a source directory and copy a size-limited random selection of specific files to a particular destination directory. Follow that?

With Mix2Stix I’ve given a source directory that contains the iTunes Music Library and a destination drive letter that my wife’s MP3 player gets mounted to. I define the size in megabytes of the amount of files to copy over that match the file filter parameter mp3. Hitting Copy! will set Mix2Stix to work. Profiles can be saved to speed up the copy process on future runs as well. Multiple file filter types can be specified if the extensions are separated with a semi-colon too.

Mix2Stix is a free java-based program that fills a niche role perfectly.