How to delete music as it's being played

Question

I have huge old collections of music that I'd like to whittle down by listening through and deleting those I don't want to keep. Currently, my process for doing so is this:

• Open the folder containing my music files and play one

• Listen to it in a player and determine that it's low quality and needs to be deleted

• Minimise the player and maximise the folder containing my music files

• Right-click and delete the file

• Repeat process for every single music file in the folder

As you can see, this is incredibly unproductive when trying to organise large collections because it requires constantly switching between the music player and the filesystem.

I currently use Windows Media Player for playing music and MPC-HC for playing video.

Is it possible to use either of these players to delete music from within the player itself, while it's being played, and then simply have it skip to the next track in the playlist/queue?

If it's not at all possible with either one of these players, is there an alternative that will let me do so?

Solution 1

Windows Media Player has an option to allow this. Go to Organize -> Options -> Library and check the option Delete files from computer when deleted from library

This option requires your music files to be part of Windows Media Player's library which by default means they need to be located in your user's Music folder (%UserProfile%\Music). If your music is stored elsewhere you can either move the files into your music folder, or add their location to WMP's library paths using Organize -> Manage Libraries -> Music.

With the option above enabled, you can now play your music from WMP's library and when you find a song you want to remove, just select it and press Delete. Playback will stop and the file will be deleted (to the recycle bin). To play the next song, simply press Enter. Alternatively, press CTRL+F before deleting the current song to start playing the next song, then press Delete

Note that WMP has a playlists feature that is visible as a side-bar (shown/hidden by the Play tab). This is separate from the library and unaffected by the obtion above. For the above option to work you need to select and delete the song from the library view, not the playlist view.

_{This method works in both Windows 7 and Windows 10.}

Solution 2

Well, good old Winamp has this feature. You can add your whole library, browse it through Winamp, and delete files directly from it.

To be honest though, I haven't used it in ages, so I don't know if the latest build (5.8) has it still.

Solution 3

I think you're doing a lot of unnecessary work by running your windows maximized. Resize your Media Player and Explorer windows so both are visible at the same time and not overlapping. Some versions of Windows have a "window snapping" feature that will let you easily dock one application to the left half of your screen and another to the right side.

When both programs are on-screen at the same time, you can process a folder quickly, without even needing to touch the mouse. In the Explorer window, press Enter to play the currently-selected file in WMP. Switch back to Explorer with Alt+Tab. Delete the song with Delete, or move to the next song with Down Arrow -> Enter. Use the left hand for Alt+Tab and the right hand for Enter, Delete, and Down Arrow. I've done this sort of thing before for sorting through photos, and I very quickly got into a rhythm (yay muscle memory) that let me burn through a large collection in no time. There's still some processing overhead for each file, but you should be able to do all of that while you're listening to the current file and deciding whether to keep it or not.

If it won't let you delete a file that's still playing, you may have to start the next one and then go back and delete it.

Solution 4

EDIT: I no longer recommend this answer. See my other answer involving MusicBee, which combines the functionality of MPC-HC with the user experience of Windows Media Player, and then some.

I found a way to do this with MPC-HC, although I still would have preferred to have used Windows Media Player, which has advantages over MPC-HC such as music visualisations and a much more natural shuffle feature.

Disappointingly, even MPC-HC can only do this by using its playlists feature, which is enabled by opening the Playlists window pane. This is disappointing, but is so far the only way I've found to do this (incidentally, setting up a playlist is also a requirement to shuffle music in MPC-HC).

---

To delete files from within MPC-HC

1. Right-click on the folder containing your music files, and click the Add to MPC-HC Playlist context menu item (note that the context menu item needs to be selected on a folder, as from my testing adding a large number of individual files to an MPC-HC playlist results in a fatal crash)

2. Within MPC-HC, select View > Playlist, or use the shortcut Ctrl+7 to open the Playlists window pane.

3. All of the music files in the folder should be loaded into this pane. Right-click anywhere in it for a context menu with more options. Select Move to Recycle Bin to delete the currently playing track and move to the next one. You can also select Shuffle here to enable MPC-HC's shuffle ability.

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Due to the playlist requirement of doing this in MPC-HC, I'm still open to other solutions involving MPC-HC, Windows Media Player or different music players entirely that does not require the use of playlists as a requirement. Visualisations would also be a huge bonus of any such solution.

Solution 5

Since kicken's answer to this question only seems to work on Windows 10, making me unable to test it, and since I got tired of trying to make MPC-HC work for this purpose (it does, but it's glitchy, its playlist view is plain ugly, and development on it has also been stalled for a while), I decided to spend the last 24 or so hours looking for and experimenting with an alternative music player.

I quickly realised I was no longer looking for just a music player - whereas previously I'd used my music player almost exclusively to listen to music, it was now overdue for me to move with the times and start using something that had more powerful music organisation abilities.

---

A much better alternative

I began by looking into foobar2000 and Clementine, based on recommendations from answers to this question and elsewhere, and although I found both okay, both were still lacking in comparison to the solution I tried last.

MusicBee is something I've been looking for for a long time without realising it - a modern music player and manager with an interface and user experience as beautiful as it is powerful. Ironically, I'd already had it installed because I'd checked it when last running Ninite, but I'd never started it up or thought to use it as my regular music player.

The one thing it is missing is a context menu item to add files in a folder to the Library, which I found odd, but clicking the Menu, Add Files to Library, and then navigating to the Playlists tab gives me the view of my files that I need:

From here, it allows me to play files and delete them as they're playing - both to the Recycle Bin and permanently (with built-in hotkeys for both).

Another thing that sets MusicBee apart from the competitors I tried is just how customisable it is - the Options panel is chock-full of settings to be enabled/ disabled and panels to be added/removed, from changing the program's icon (with four included options):

...to changing virtually every component of the layout:

It also comes with visualisations, as well as built-in transcoders and skins (many of them dark, for those who are into that sort of thing), and many other powerful features.

Then there's the Theater mode, which is a big sell for me since I hadn't until today found a full-screen music player view that rivals that of (Windows 7's version of) Windows Media Player:

Finally, MusicBee is complete freeware. That's worth mentioning because at this point this answer is starting to sound like a product plug, which I apologise for, but it's very rare that I come across a product that I know will massively transform the way I do things and make me ten times more productive as a result.

PS. Please don't judge me for my music tastes, this is just one of many collections of music that I've inherited and am trying to separate the wheat from

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Comments

[Admin]

An alternate solution would be to find a way to play them from the command line (I'm guessing e.g. wmplayer file.mp3) then you can Up, Home, Ctrl+Del, del, Enter to delete them.

[Admin]

By "determine that it's low quality" do you really mean bitrate or some other aspect of the file, rather than your preference for the music? If it's the former, you may be able to run a program or filter the list by "quality" for easier deletion.

[Admin]

@spuck Listening by ear rather than bitrate.

[Admin]

I usually just open both, then lay out the windows side-by-side. No need to minimize/maximize all the time.

[Admin]

If the collection has rarities, see if you can send them to archive.org before deleting them. There's a lot of stuff "lost" like that, nowadays.

[RJFalconer]

I've been using WA for decades and didn't know this existed. Nice. Wish there was a hotkey bind for it. I took the liberty of adding a screenshot to your answer. (It's a crime to remove "The Who - My Generation" but I thought it was appropriate given all Winamp2 users are old timers like us)

[Vilx-]

@RJFalconer - Thanks for the screenshot! Yeah, I didn't find an option for adding a shortcut either. But - you can select multiple files, so there's that!

[isanae]

You can also set a keyboard shortcut in the settings for "Move to Recycle Bin". I've had it to shift+delete for years. You can then use AutoHotkey to create a global shortcut if you want MPC to run in the background.

[Mast]

Start the next track, remove the previous song while waiting for the first seconds of music to register, repeat.

[Hashim Aziz]

I'm struggling to understand how exactly this would work without needing to make sure the music is in the Library, at which point it's more involved than even the MPC-HC implementation with its playlists feature. Maybe this is because I'm on Windows 7. I'll have to test it on 10 when I eventually move to it.

[Hashim Aziz]

@isanae That's a great tip, I'd completely forgotten about MPC-HC's hotkey customisability.

[Hashim Aziz]

I was talking about minimising the windows there rather than closing, and yes you're right, if you stay focused and don't select anything else in Explorer then the file should stay selected so searching can be avoided - I've edited to reflect these points. That said, your suggestion of using two windows and cutting and pasting files over would be even slower, and misses the point that I was looking for a way to do this within the player in order to interact with the filesystem less and make the process faster, not the opposite of that.

[Hashim Aziz]

Your last edit confuses things.

[Hashim Aziz]

This answer doesn't really do much except to point out the option in the settings, which for the record was already checked on my system. How exactly does that setting relate to actually being able to delete the music files while they're playing - what's the setup and the process for doing so?

[kicken]

@Hashim, when the option is enabled you can just select the current song in WMP and press delete and it'll delete the file from disk.

[Hashim Aziz]

This is an otherwise good solution for anyone not willing to move from their current music player, and I've upvoted accordingly, but it still involves dealing directly with the filesystem, which is always going to be slower than using a proper solution like a player that can delete music from within in. Hacks like "start the next one and then go back and delete it" are yet another another reason I'd prefer to use those more complete solutions.

[Hashim Aziz]

The problem with Winamp is that it looks ancient and most of the people that still use it are mainly doing so for nostalgia. I am really looking forward to seeing what the upcoming re-release will be like though, and I've already used their survey to submitt "Delete files from within the player" and "visualisations" as feature requests. ;)

[Hashim Aziz]

It seems that this solution doesn't work on Windows 7 at all, then.

[Vilx-]

@Hashim - There's no indication that there will be a new release in the next few years. The project is not quite dead, but there's nobody who would have the time to spend on it. So don't hold your breath. However what does that matter when you only need it for one job? Anyways, the "delete from player" feature is already there. If it's not in 5.8, then check here for the previous version. That definitely has it. As for visualisations - I don't know what is state of the art today, but I've yet to see something better than Winamp's MilkDrop.

[Criggie]

Agreed, multiple monitors or at least using one's screen real-estate wisely would help.

[Señor CMasMas]

This was the first thought that came to my mind too.

[kicken]

@Hashim, I created a Windows 7 Pro VM and gave it a test. The option was available and worked just fine there as well. I've expanded the answer with some further details

[InterLinked]

@kicken I could be wrong but an easier approach might be to right-click all the audio files and simply click "Add to Windows Media Player list". Regardless of where they are located, that easily allows for an impromptu playlist.

[xxbbcc]

I think Winamp is still by far the best Windows desktop music player out there. I don't use it for nostalgia, I use it because nothing comes close to it.

[Vilx-]

@xxbbcc - True, before I went over to Spotify about a year ago, I used it too for all my music needs. Spotify won because it's legal to use it at my workplace and it has almost all the songs in the world, meaning I don't need to hunt them down anymore. But if I was playing from a local library again, I'd go for Winamp. Also, it has the "Enhancer" plugin, which is even more abandoned than Winamp itself, but is still the best dsp plugin I've seen anywhere.

[Stobor]

As noted above - add to "playlist" is different to add to "library"

[Veskah]

I'm pretty sure Foobar2000 has this feature as well (it might be a separate component you have to add however)

[Vilx-]

@Veskah - I've never used it actually, so I can't say. I know that Foobar2000 is compatible with Winamp's plugins so it wouldn't be a suprise.

[JPhi1618]

@xxbbcc, It does really whip the llamas ass.

[Hashim Aziz]

Sorry for the late response, I was suspended. I realised that I had been using WMP in its full player mode all this time, and wasn't even aware that you could play from the other view. Accepted this as best answer because it answers the question of how to do this with Windows Media Player, and now contains a lot more detail than it previously did. I'll leave my answers up for those who want a non-WMP solution.

[Meraj al Maksud]

This solution needs more attention as it does not require you to change your current music player to proceed with deletion.

[Meraj al Maksud]

You need to provide step by step instructions to make this answer better.

[jkschin]

i didn't find "delete" in Clementine's keyboard shortcut settings page

[Costa]

Winamp 2 has a File Deleter plugin: winampheritage.com/plugin/file-deleter-v2/141713

[Mike]

Thank you, I don't know how I've missed this software.

[Álvaro Franz]

Best option ever! Thanks.