Automatic playlist creation
August 3, 2008 11:27 PM Subscribe
Auto generation of mp3 playlists for large collections where individual albums are in subfolders - any software suggestions?
I have tens of thousands of songs organized in the format B/Beatles/Beatles - White Album and so on. I have no playlists at the moment, but I'd love to automatically create one for each subfolder in the directory structure (which I can manually clean up after). Anyone know of a good solution?
(I searched, assuming this would have been asked, only found a few old questions that had dead links and lots of questions about organization but not this in particular)
I have tens of thousands of songs organized in the format B/Beatles/Beatles - White Album and so on. I have no playlists at the moment, but I'd love to automatically create one for each subfolder in the directory structure (which I can manually clean up after). Anyone know of a good solution?
(I searched, assuming this would have been asked, only found a few old questions that had dead links and lots of questions about organization but not this in particular)
Response by poster: Yes, I should have specified, I also searched google and found dozens of programs that claimed to do at least part of what I'm talking about. I'd really rather not install and wade through a bunch of dubious applications if someone can suggest something that has worked for them.
I did also see a few comments about MediaMonkey being able to do it, but yeah, I'd rather not import my library to a new player if I don't have to (would the .m3u it generates be playable by WMP)?
posted by loquax at 6:35 AM on August 4, 2008
I did also see a few comments about MediaMonkey being able to do it, but yeah, I'd rather not import my library to a new player if I don't have to (would the .m3u it generates be playable by WMP)?
posted by loquax at 6:35 AM on August 4, 2008
I've just looked through a few stray *.m3u files in my MP3 collection [I use iTunes and therefore usually delete them], and many of them are just naked listings of filenames, i.e.
posted by chazlarson at 9:17 AM on August 4, 2008
01 - Alison Kraus - SO LONG SO WRONG.MP3I just tested the bash script on this page on a directory of MP3s under Mac OS X and it generated this sort of simple m3u for every directory.
02 - Alison Kraus - NO PLACE TO HIDE.MP3
03 - Alison Kraus - DEEPER THAN CRYING.MP3
...
posted by chazlarson at 9:17 AM on August 4, 2008
...and this perl script just generated an expanded m3u file for the same directory. This one, by default, doesn't generate separate m3u's for every subdirectory, so it'll need to be wrapped in a batch file or somesuch.
#EXTM3Uposted by chazlarson at 9:48 AM on August 4, 2008
#EXTINF:112,Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble - Scuttlebuttin'
.\Couldn't Stand The Weather\01 Scuttlebuttin' 2.mp3
#EXTINF:281,Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble - Couldn't Stand The Weather
.\Couldn't Stand The Weather\02 Couldn't Stand The Weather 2.mp3
#EXTINF:295,Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble - The Things (That) I Used To Do
.\Couldn't Stand The Weather\03 The Things (That) I Used To Do.mp3
...
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Seriously, linking to a generic google search is not an answer, and is only extremely vaguely "help[ing] to find an answer".
MediaMonkey has a Batch M3U Creator script which should do what you want, though you'd need to import your MP3 collection into MediaMonkey first...
posted by benzo8 at 2:53 AM on August 4, 2008