Desktop player that repeats each chapter before moving on?

January 10, 2019 9:06 AM

Is there a desktop media player that will play each file in a playlist more than once before moving to the next?

I listen to all kinds of things at work and - because I'm at work - I only half listen. Or less.

I want to configure a play list so that chapter 1 repeats before chapter 2 begins.

Ideally, I could configure the repeats. Just twice if I'm working with data and have plenty of time to pay attention, for instance, or five times if I'm writing for someone's presentation and have to think almost full time.

If Windows Media Player and Groove has this capacity, I can't find it.

It easy to have no idea what's going on in an audiobook at the hallway point because I was 100% focused for two hours and missed six chapters.

Listening to an entiter book repeatedly -
or just starting over - means spoilers in every chapter.

posted by Lesser Shrew to Technology (8 answers total)

Best answer: I don't know if you'll find anyting you can configure that way, but I see two other ways you could do it.

1. Just set it on track-repeat. Listen 2 times, 5 times, whatever, before you manually move on to the next track.

2. Create a playlist and put the chapters on there twice. Then sort the playlist alphabetically or by track number. It should then play each chapter twice.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:10 AM on January 10, 2019

Response by poster: Interesting and painfully obvious - now that you thought of it!

Now to work up a script to redo the titles of 102 mp3 files so the player will think they're unique tracks. ;)
posted by Lesser Shrew at 12:15 PM on January 10, 2019

I believe most mp3 players will let you add the same track to a playlist twice? If not, you could just copy the folder entirely. Or you could use Bulk Rename Utility if you want to batch-rename copies of the files.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:03 PM on January 10, 2019

Your OS info might help.

find /net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark\ 80\'s/ -type f -iname '*.mp3'| sort -n | perl -ne 'print "$_$_"' >  foo.m3u

Gives me a perfectly fine .M3U playlist file that will play each song in that directory 2-wice.

You don't have to worry about unique. You just need to create a file with the paths to the tracks you want to play and tell your player to play them. It will play them in the order of the list of files in the playlist.

You're right in the painfully obvious part but it's so much simpler for 99% of every media player I've ever run across. Create a .m3u file, tell the player to play it. Done.

Tell us your OS, and probably somebody will come up with something stupidly obvious/simple (for the type that was just screaming into the void PLAYLISTS AND SCRIPTS) that works on your machine... :)

foo.m3u for example:

/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/001- Tones on Tail - Go!.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/001- Tones on Tail - Go!.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/002- The Sisters Of Mercy - Alice (Burnt Master).mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/002- The Sisters Of Mercy - Alice (Burnt Master).mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/003- Bauhaus - She's In Parties.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/003- Bauhaus - She's In Parties.mp3
...
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/101- The Cure - The Holy Hour.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/101- The Cure - The Holy Hour.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/102- Bauhaus - Silent Hedges.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/102- Bauhaus - Silent Hedges.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/103- The Sisterhood - Rain From Heaven.mp3
/net/zim/media/c1/Music/CD/Dark 80's/103- The Sisterhood - Rain From Heaven.mp3
posted by zengargoyle at 12:16 AM on January 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Can I mark all as best answer?

For reference, I should have mentioned that this a work thing and we cannot install anything on our laptops.

The OS is Windows and the two players we have, Windows Media and Groove, absolutely do playlists based on track names and don't allow duplicates in playlists.)

(Groove might be Windows Media Player in a fancy skin.)
posted by Lesser Shrew at 9:31 AM on January 13, 2019

Response by poster: For anyone reading this as a ref - turns out there is something unique to the way our work laptops are configured.

Media players on my home laptop and desktop are easily fooled by chapter names where I created duplicates by batch renaming file names so they look like this: Chapter1, Chapter1a, Chapter1b....

Possibly my corporate overlords have configured the system so that things that are almost identical trigger a protection of some kind and are ignored. I don't know.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 1:41 PM on January 19, 2019

I think I missed the Chapters bit. Are these single files with multiple chapters in each file? I can see that doubling of entries would confuse something. But the only think I can come up with is to use some other program to extract each chapter into its own .mp3 file (i.e. each original .mp3 gets turned into a directory of multiple .mp3's one for each chapter). Which I guess is problematic.

I haven't had the need to dig into media files with chapters.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:00 PM on January 22, 2019

Response by poster: @zengargoyle,
The chapters in this case are audio book chapters and each has a name like

Bible_Chapter_1_Genesis
Bible_Chapter_2_Exodus
Bible_Chapter_3_Leviticus

And I created dupes with a naming convention to make them

Bible_Chapter_1_Genesis
Bible_Chapter_1a_Genesis
Bible_Chapter_2_Exodus
Bible_Chapter_2a_Exodus
Bible_Chapter_3_Leviticus
Bible_Chapter_3a_Leviticus

So the file name and the track names are all unique. There appears to be some other attribute that is still the identical and this "identicalness" convinced my work computer to ignore the duplicates. I can make a playlist with all the underscore-number-underscore files, or all the underscore-number-a-underscore files, but not with both in the same playlist.

This is not an issue on my personal computer - which is also windows. My guess is a security setting or something in Windows professional or our installation that prevents this.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 2:58 PM on February 17, 2019