How do I convert a text list of songs into a working music playlist file?

July 24, 2005 11:09 PM

Is there an easy way to convert a text list of songs (in "Artist - Song" format) into a working playlist? What I'm trying to do is take the Audioscrobbler Top Tracks list, and load it into Winamp.

I tried to copy the list into a txt file, clean it up, and convert it to an m3u file. This loaded into Winamp, but, as there was no directory location information, did not link to the actual mp3s on my drive. I'm I going about this the wrong way? Is there an easier way to do this?

posted by monsterhero to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Seems you were doing it right (if the playlist was in the same location as your songs, anyway). Winamp playlists are just text files. Maybe this can be of use?
posted by Skyanth at 11:14 PM on July 24, 2005

Response by poster: The playlist is not in the same location as my song, and moving the songs isn't really an option.
posted by monsterhero at 11:22 PM on July 24, 2005

Well, first of all, you need some way to figure out what filename goes with each song, and what folder it's in. If Winamp is scriptable this will probably be fairly easy -- I know some Windows apps can be scripted with VBScript. (I could do it pretty easily in AppleScript for the Mac version of iTunes.)
posted by kindall at 11:50 PM on July 24, 2005

If they're not in the same location you have to add the directory information to the song name in your playlist or move the playlist to where the songs are.
posted by Skyanth at 4:26 AM on July 25, 2005

BTW, Audioscrobbler is also going to change the artist names to a standardized version which may not match your files.
posted by smackfu at 6:36 AM on July 25, 2005

Well, first of all, you need some way to figure out what filename goes with each song, and what folder it's in. If Winamp is scriptable this will probably be fairly easy

Provided that your filenames are all normalized based on artist and track title only, and that they're all exact matches for the artists and track titles from Audioscrobbler, as smackfu mentioned.
posted by jjg at 8:29 AM on July 25, 2005

Well, on the Mac with iTunes I'd read the .m3u file and break it into a list at each carriage return. Then for each line, I'd break it at the hyphen into separate title and artist variables and ask for a list of all the songs with a particular title ("every file track of library playlist 1 whose name is x"), loop through the returned list to see which (if any) of these tracks have the correct artist, and then tell iTunes to add the matching tracks to an iTunes playlist. (You could also build a new .m3u playlist file by asking for the path to each file.)

I don't have the details of how you'd accomplish that in Winamp, but a similar approach should be feasible if Winamp has a decent object model and is scriptable.
posted by kindall at 9:05 AM on July 25, 2005