So let's say I might have "borrowed" a USB drive from a guy who "borrowed" it from a guy who "inherited" it somewhere. On this alleged drive there might be close to 400 gigs of digital music files (it might be a collection of rock, country, pop, jazz, and live music sets totalling somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 songs). Of course none of us would ever dream of copying the contents of this drive since that would be illegal in the eyes of the RIAA, but let's just say that I've been asked if I might catalog its contents for the owner while I have it on loan. Nothing fancy, just a list of the basic information for each folder including the artist, album title, genre, file format & bitrate, the number of tracks, and make some comments if I were to find any stuff that may be needing some extra work (files out of sequence, missing titles or metadata, etc).
Hypothetically speaking, I'd probably just manually scan the folders in alphabetical order and enter the data into a spreadsheet to record the requested information (even though I probably could have created a program to do this automatically without much trouble if the directory structure had been at least a little more consistent - theoretically, that is). It would be tedious, but it would definitely be fun to see what all might be hiding on there. If I started doing this in my spare time about a week ago, I guess that by now I'd probably be about up to the letter "L" (as in Lenny Kravitz), and have recorded the contents of around 18,702 songs in 1,500-something folders representing the work of 400-some-odd artists. In other words I'd be a little less than halfway done.
So far I may have found things ranging from a mostly complete library of AC/DC albums, to a 5 disc box set by Johnny Cash, to a collection of over 50 Bob Marley concert sessions, to KC & the Sunshine Band's Greatest Hits. But the coolest thing I probably would have found by now would be some of those more unusual artists and/or titles that might exist on such a drive.
Songs like, "My Cellmate Thinks I'm Sexy" by Cledus T Judd.
Or "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off" by Joe Nichols.
If any of this were true, I might have to start listening to more country music. I think those titles are hilarious!