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 The whole TuneTracker System revolves around the use of attributes, such as Artist, Title, Comment, Genre, etc. That's how your music is selected in TuneStacker, found in Lightning, and in some cases, even retrieved by TuneTracker itself. Marking the attributes of your audio files, then, is obviously an important step when adding songs, promos, PSAs, etc., to your TuneTracker computer. That's where Army Knife can really come in handy, because it spares you from having to manually enter in a lot of that data to each song separately. To add songs to Army Knife, just drop a selection of them into the program, or drop in a folder icon containing them, even if there are many subfolders inside. Army Knife will build a list of all the audio files. Now, you're ready to go. There are several ways you can add/change song attributes in Army Knife. Choose the one you want using the dropdown button in the upper left corner of the interface. The Editor In Editor mode, you can make manual changes to all the songs you've dropped into Army Knife, or a select group of them. Click the pulldown button in the upper left, and choose "The Editor." By default, the entire list of songs you dropped in is selected. If you want to limit the changes you're about to make to fewer songs, do SHIFT-Click to select the ones you want. Put a checkmark in the attribute field(s) where you want to make a change, and type-in the change. Click Apply or do CTRL-Enter. Example: If you decide to use the word "Gospel" in the Genre field, put a checkmark in just the Genre checkbox, type in the word Gospel and click Apply or do CTRL-ENTER.< Tags and Attributes In Tags and Attributes mode, you can "dig out" the data that might already be available to you in your MP3 files' ID3 tags, and copy it to the attributes used by the TuneTracker System. This can be an enormous time saver. Click the pulldown button in the upper left, and choose "Tags and Attributes." Select Tags --> Attributes By default, the entire list of songs you dropped in is selected. If you want to limit the changes you're about to make to fewer songs, do SHIFT-Click to select the ones you want. Put a checkmark next to the option, "Tags -> Attributes" and click Apply or do CTRL-ENTER. If ID tag information was found by this method, you will know it by going back to the Editor mode, clicking on individual songs, and seeing what attribute information is now available. Name and Attributes Occasionally, songs imported into your computer might not contain ID3 tags, but information will be built right into the filename. No worries. Army Knife can deal with that too. An example song filename might look like this: 03 - Elton John - honky Cat - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.mp3 As you can see, the fields of information are in the name of the file, separated by spaces and hyphens (dashes). Army Knife can retrieve the information, once you tell it where to look in the filename for the various attributes. Click the pulldown button in the upper left, and choose "Name and Attributes." Select the option, Name --> Attributes Look at the legend in the Army Knife screen, which shows you how to express to Army Knife where to look in the filenames for the info. Using the example above, you would enter a line that looks like this: /k - /a - /t - /n.mp3 Based on the legend you'll see in Army Knife, this tells the program to retrieve the Track number, skip the space hyphen space, get the Artist, skip the space hyphen space, get the Title, skip the space hyphen space, get the Album, and skip the .mp3 at the end. Click Apply (or do CTRL-Enter). If ID tag information was correctly retrieved by this method, you will know it by going back to the Editor mode, clicking on individual songs, and seeing what attribute information is now available. 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. 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. 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