Re: [madman-discuss] Export to M3U

[Andy H. <ahe...@gm...>]

> >The player supports M3U playlists, which madman can import,
> >but note export.
> >
> I think Madman does have an export feature, but the files that it
> creates are not directly compatible with the iRiver. At least my iHP140
> only accepts .m3u files that have DOS style linefeeds and directory
> separators"/". Also the paths need to be relative to the root of the
> device and not the absoute path. I think I may have a Perl or Bash
> script that I used to do some auto generation (provided the songs are
> properly tagged). Let me know if your interested and i'll see what I can
> find.

What exactly did the scripts do?  I would probably be interested in
seeing them (if only for seeing what they do and how they do them.  I
haven't learned any good scripting languages yet).

> 
> >I was wondering if any support for directly exporting M3U playlists
> >was going to exist.  Ideally I would like to be able to hit a single
> >button and have it export all the playlists (but idealy, we'd all like
> >a button on our keyboard that would order us pizza, oh well...).  Are
> >there plans to add this?  Is there an easy way I could interface with
> >madman to add it myself?  I saw something mentioned about plugins on
> >the website, but there didn't seem to be much info.
> >
> >
> I think this feature is on the TODO list, but i've not seen any
> implementations. I briefly looked into this and found the best
> documentation was the existing plugin scripts. The plugins are designed
> around working with the currently selected files, which does not really
> fit your aim of creating lots of playlists for your entire collection.

Then again, Madman is OSS, so I could always just hack it directly
into the program, instead of as a plugin. :)
I'm thinking of doing that anyway, and if I think it's a decent enough
job I'll probably submit it so everyone can use it.  But then again,
going that rout would require I become familiar with most of the
madman code, instead of just a plugin API.

> 
> >Eventually I would like to write something that would sync my music
> >with my player (probably using rsync) and automatically export the
> >playlists to it.
> >
> Yes I think this would be really useful. Some kind of export wizard or
> synchronisation tool.
> It should be fairly easy to add some external script that gets run
> whenever the syncronisation takes place.
> This could create playlist files, update the iRiver DB file or whatever
> else is needed.

Right now I don't use the DB feature.  The extra time to boot the
player kind of annoyed me, and I got almost the same functionality
from my filesystem structure (artist/album/tracks).  Though I was
thinking of writing something that would generate it, assuming I could
figure out the file's format.

> 
> BTW - I have actually given up on using playlists to manage my music on
> my iRiver. I have more than 200 CD's on my device so it will not display
> all the playlists (this limitation is listed in the documentation). It
> is also too slow to scroll through a list that is so long. I have fallen
> back on storing everything in a "artist/album/00_track.ogg" file
> structure and I find this works best for me. Provided you have the track
> numbers in the filenames you can just browse to a particular album and
> hit play.

I have over 3000 songs (can't remember how many CDs it is) but I don't
have that problem.  I don't use playlists for things like a particular
artist (well, except in one case).  I like to listen to my music by
just hitting random and letting the player pick.  I use the playlists
to create subsets of my entire collection to play (i used to just do
random over everything).  I only have about 10 playlists, and they're
for things like "Soundtracks", "Favorites", "Instrumental", etc.  For
the kind of listening I do, playlists are exactly what I'm looking
for, and since I don't use many at all it's no problem.

   -Andy