Best way to browse and read data from a lot of files?

Question

Hi All,
I am trying to read tags from music files. Currently I'm listing all the files and then reading through the tags, as below:
List<File> result = new ArrayList<File>();
FilenameFilter mp3filter = new FilenameFilter() {
     public boolean accept(File dir, String name) {
          return name.endsWith(".mp3");
FilenameFilter wmafilter = new FilenameFilter() {
     public boolean accept(File dir, String name) {
          return name.endsWith(".wma");
FileFilter dirFilter = new FileFilter() {
     public boolean accept(File file) {
          return file.isDirectory();
File[] dirList = aStartingDir.listFiles(dirFilter);
File[] mp3files = aStartingDir.listFiles(mp3filter);
File[] wmafiles = aStartingDir.listFiles(wmafilter);
List<File> filesDirs = Arrays.asList(dirList);
List<File> filesMp3 = Arrays.asList(mp3files);
List<File> filesWma = Arrays.asList(wmafiles);
for (File file : filesMp3) {
     result.add(file);
for (File file : filesWma) {
     result.add(file);
for (File file : filesDirs) {
     List<File> deeperList = getFileListing(file);
     result.addAll(deeperList);
}and then read the files in a for loop through the list.
Is there a better way to do the same?

Answer 1

Well, you could optimize that just a little bit by only calling listFiles once with a filter that would accept directories, wmas, and mp3s all in one go. Then you could iterate through the results and separate them into the three categories after you had the complete recursive directory listing. That may be faster. But your OS will likely cache the results of the directory listing, thus minimizing the effort of your current approach. But honestly, no... you need the headers from every file, so you'll need to find each file and then check the headers.
If you want, you can cache the results somewhere for future reference. Are you concerned about performance or some such?