BUNDLED SPECIAL UTILITIES Backups Recommended (Especially with older versions of Army Knife) Army knife is capable of making changes to large numbers of files simultaneously. Earlier versions lacked some safety measures that made it possible to accidentally apply changes to more files than you intended. Current versions make those errors far more difficult, but you should still pay attention to what you're doing if making bulk changes, and, ideally, should do a backup of your audio library first. Army Knife - The Great Time Saver Army Knife can save you time like crazy! Suppose you have 700 MP3 songs you are moving to BeOS to use in the TuneTracker™ System. If they're typical MP3 song files, they have information related to their contents, such as Artist, Title, Album, Genre, and other information stored away inside them in "ID3 tags." Once you've moved them to BeOS, you can use Army Knife to copy all that precious ID3 tag information to their corresponding song attributes. Just select the whole bunch of files (or the folder containing them) and drag them into Army Knife, click the "Editor" button and change it to the option, "Tags and Attributes." Once there, choose "Tags -> Attributes" and click Apply or do CTRL-ENTER. In a few moments, it will do all 700 of them! You can also use Army Knife to selectively adjust the attributes for one file or a as many of them as you have dropped into the program. For example, if you decide to use the word "Song" in the comment attribute, first click "..." to clear all the checkmarks, then put a checkmark in just the Comment checkbox, type in the word Song and click Apply or do CTRL-ENTER. Fast? Comprehensive? In a recent test, we dragged the main drive icon of our BeOS system and dropped it into Army Knife. It found every song on the hard drive, and let us adjust the attributes of all of them in just a few seconds. You can also use Army Knife to instantly adjust the attributes of all the files found in a query search. Just left-click on the desktop background of your BeOS screen, do CTRL-F and use the Find screen's controls to do a search. From the search results, drag as many or as few from the list as you like into Army Knife. Army Knife will make its changes to all the files without regard to where each is physically located. They can be scattered in folders all over your hard drive and Army Knife will still adjust them all to your liking. Other things you can do with Army Knife? Mark the "Info" attribute of your songs. Copy the BeOS attributes you've assigned to your files to their corresponding ID3 tags Extract ID3 tags from long filenames that have the tag information built into them, and apply that information to the file attributes Create long filenames from ID3 tags or BeOS attributes View and edit ID3 tags With Army Knife closed, right-click on a group of audio files and choose "Open With / Army Knife." One note of caution, this approach is best reserved for smaller groups of files. Large groups of files opened in this way can cause lockups, so limit this technique to processing 25 songs or less! You can auto-detect the lengths of all of your songs by simply dropping them into Army Knife. As soon as it has built its list, you can close the program. When you look in your music folder afterwards, the length field will be filled in for all the songs. We've only scratched the surface of what Army Knife can do for you. There is full documentation in the Army Knife folder of your TuneTracker installation. Become familiar with the powerful features in this program. It's time well spent. You're going to love using this utility. Table of Contents