Topic: Can somebody please make a playlist creator? (Read 31080 times)

Mastiff · « **Reply #100 on:** January 07, 2004, 01:51:41 am »

Yes, my eye takes about 90 seconds to blink, but that's because I have close to 40 000 tracks, and close to 3000 number one tracks. But without that play list (you need to set it to [Track#]<2 instead of =1 since =1 will give you all track numbers with 1 in them (11, 12,13 and so on) I let it work for around four hours and it wasn't yet done. I never bothered to finish it, it was a futile exercise.

johnp · « **Reply #101 on:** January 07, 2004, 01:53:08 am »

Hi Again,

I had all the fields selected except Track # so Iselected that. It still took a long time so I bailed on that run. I looked at the ...mpl.xml output and it still had the egg shaped characters instaed of the AlbumID, so I added the AlbumID field and put a check next to it. I then unchecked the transform section so it would just generate the xml. The xml list now has Album IDs Yippee!!!

Unfortuantely, the html transforatin is still taking a long time. I will e-mail the latest ...mpl.xml ouput for your review.

Thanks,

John

Mastiff · « **Reply #102 on:** January 07, 2004, 01:59:52 am »

Re-read Scott's message about the playlist with only number one tracks. Then have a look at the message I just left above, those two together will tell you how to cut down on your time.

johnp · « **Reply #103 on:** January 07, 2004, 02:13:50 am »

OK I figured that out and it works great!! Transformed in about 30 seconds or so. Thanks you guys for all your help. Since you are paying attention Mastiff, do you know how to call an internal Media Center playlist from Girder?

Thanks,

John

Mastiff · « **Reply #104 on:** January 07, 2004, 02:19:30 am »

Nope, I don't. I export the playlists with Nila's plugin and call them externally. But I'm sure there is a way. The problem with this approach may be that calling playlist 1 may call all play lists with 1 in them. But that I don't know for sure.

nila · « **Reply #105 on:** January 07, 2004, 02:41:23 am »

Remind me and I might be able to look into this.

Its now possible to make out of process plugins which means I can make a stand alone .exe that can interact with MC just like a plugin.

This would mean that you could call the program with a parameter (ie playlist number) and it would tell MC to play EXACTLY that playlist.

Would there be much advantage of having it set up like that?

johnp · « **Reply #106 on:** January 07, 2004, 03:01:27 am »

Here is what I am thinking.

Some people may not like the process of exporting individual playlists, although you have made it quite simple for albums, people might have favorites like "His" and "Hers" or "Kid's, John's and Joan's" these types of lists are not all inclusive and will change over time. It seems simplest to me if I could set it up to have the zone in my daughter's room activate and start playing her favorites as soon as she activates the zone with the keypad or Music Lobby Interface.

For example, my teenage daughter walks into the family room and accesses the zone that is reserved for her lets say it is zone 3. As son as she selects the source input as Music Server zone 3, it could start playing her favorites automatically. When I come home however, I would want to activate my pre-defined zone, and then it would load and start playing my favorites in that zone, which could be over ridden by me selecting an album via the keypad, or PPC interface etc.

I understand that I could easily export the playlists and load them with the available tools today, but this would take one more step out of the process.

Does that make any sense?

nila · « **Reply #107 on:** January 07, 2004, 06:21:16 am »

lol - not too much as the kind of setup your talking about is WAY more than I could even dream of building any time in the anywhere near future.

But I could set it up so you could call playlists directly with an external program and then get girder to call it.

Mastiff · « **Reply #108 on:** January 07, 2004, 08:11:55 am »

My system is quite like that. My son has his own playlist on the OK button of the Creative Audigy Drive IR remote he has on his room. In addition to that he can of course call any other playlist with the numbered playlists I have exported with Nila's plugin. As for myself I normally use NetRemote on my attached to the hip Ipaq 5450. My wife uses either the IR remote in the living room, the bedroom or the bathroom (nice to have pan fleute music in the bubble bath, apparently...) or the NetRemote computer in the living room.

Finally in the car (my Chevy Suburban mp3SUV) we have three remotes, the kids in the back seat (who listens throught headphones) have one IR remote each, while in the front seat we use an ATI Remote Wonder (originally an X10 remote that ATI puts their name on) for the headunit. Kevin (

has his own "shortcut buttons" to his favourites (that changes almost on a weekly basis) while Lisa (6) prefers to ask daddy what number to punch next.

To keep track of all this I will from now on use the Mastiff's Album Listing that sraymond created for me (it saves me a lot of work exporting and formatting the library in Word), and I will, as I have before done, keep one printout in the living room and one in the car. I guess Kevin will want his own printout soon as well...

I need to create a page on my website about the car system, and one about the playlist system.

Zarius · « **Reply #109 on:** January 07, 2004, 07:10:34 pm »

RE: Program to run playlists from command line.

It seems that one can use mjextman for this already... run:

mjextman.exe /Clear (note: this is case sensitive)

then,

mjextman.exe /Play treepath=playlists\My Playlist 1

This can be done is Girder with a multi-command, or from the command line with a batch file. There could be some other uses for the program that I've missed, but if this current functionality works it's enough for me.

johnp · « **Reply #110 on:** January 07, 2004, 09:25:04 pm »

Quote from: Zarius on January 07, 2004, 07:10:34 pm

RE: Program to run playlists from command line.

It seems that one can use mjextman for this already... run:

mjextman.exe /Clear (note: this is case sensitive)

then,

mjextman.exe /Play treepath=playlists\My Playlist 1

This can be done is Girder with a multi-command, or from the command line with a batch file. There could be some other uses for the program that I've missed, but if this current functionality works it's enough for me.

This is exactly what I was hoping for.

Thanks so much,

John

Mastiff · « **Reply #111 on:** January 08, 2004, 01:26:40 am »

Nila, here's a crazy idea: If you're making a plug-in to open playlists, how about making it multi-zone aware, so you can send the playlists to a specific zone as well? If it was a command line interface we could see something like this:

nilaplug.exe -z2 -list103 -add/-play/-append

Would that be possible? This is in my opinion the most seriuos thing lacking for multi-zone automation.

nila · « **Reply #112 on:** January 08, 2004, 04:13:51 am »

I'd LOVE to say yes Mastiff but the SDK is around AT LEAST a year old if not more and there is NO support for Zones AT ALL in it.
A search for the word 'Zone' on the page returns NOTHING.

I can make a program that you can call like this:

mcControl.exe play/append/etc [albumID]
so it'd look like this:

mcControl.exe play 514
for instance?

Would that be any use?
Anything else you'd like it to do?

Mastiff · « **Reply #113 on:** January 08, 2004, 04:37:58 am »

Nila, it would probably make the process a bit cleaner, and I won't have to export the playlists. But it will still demand a multigroup in Girder: One command that changes zone, one that waits until the correct zone is ready and one that executes the playlist. But one thing: Since it's configurable what field you put the album ID in (I use a field only called ID, the basis of the Mastiff's Album Listing that sraymond made for me) it should be configurable what field you choose. Or have you already planned it to be so configurable that you can simply use the string [albumID], [ID] or whatever you like, so you can use any field as the input?

nila · « **Reply #114 on:** January 08, 2004, 05:17:58 am »

Yeah ok, that'd be fairly easy

How does Girder change the zones? If it can do it then I must be able to (I think).

Join the irc chat if you can as it'd be easier to discuss it then.

Mastiff · « **Reply #115 on:** January 08, 2004, 05:40:52 am »

I'm on an expensive dial-up connection (waiting for broadband...), so I'd rather not IRC. But the changing of zones is a pretty easy command line alternative:

mjextman /Command SetZone 2

The tricky bit is that I'll have to wait until the right zone comes up (which varies with what the computer's doing, and 90 % success rate is not acceptable in my wife and children proof system, it has to be 100%), and that I do with a Girder wait for window command with a timeout on 5 seconds (normal time is about one second, the longest I've seen under 100 % CPU load is three, but I take no chances) that waits for this:

Media Center (Zone Name)

Then the playlist is always sendt to the correct zone. Believe me, if my son wants to listen to heavy metal in his room (I have trained him good!

) it does not go down well if that comes to the living room in the middle of one of my wife's Celine Dion sessions. Or even worse: To the bathroom when she's in the bubble bath with pan fleute on high volume to be audible over the sound of the pump!

Abyway, if you send me e-mail I'll be able to answer within seconds since I have e-mail warning on my cellphone, that's connected to my Ipaq with bluetooth.

nila · « **Reply #116 on:** January 08, 2004, 05:46:54 am »

What'd u mean you wait for that?
Not sure exactly what 'that' is?

I can make the program call mjextman Zoneblah easily enough.

Just need to understand the next bit your refering to

Mastiff · « **Reply #117 on:** January 08, 2004, 05:56:45 am »

"That" refers back to the zone. I have to wait until MC has changed to the correct zone, so the playlists gets played in the correct zone.

nila · « **Reply #118 on:** January 08, 2004, 06:03:36 am »

Yeah - how do you decide if MC has changed to the correct Zone yet?

I can use that to check in the program then make it work great

Mastiff · « **Reply #119 on:** January 08, 2004, 06:08:13 am »

You need to read all of my long, boring messages, Nila!

From the message above:

Quote

and that I do with a Girder wait for window command with a timeout on 5 seconds (normal time is about one second, the longest I've seen under 100 % CPU load is three, but I take no chances) that waits for this:

Media Center (Zone Name)

Then the playlist is always sendt to the correct zone.

By the way I think have solved the genre sorting problem with the Album ID plug-in, all though it will take some time:

1. I do a backup of the library.
2. I remove all tracks except for those in the first genre from the library.
3. I set IDs on that and copy the IDs to a field that is retained in tags (probably Custom 3, which I have used for that purpose before).
4. I restore the backup of the full library.
5. I do an update from tags on the first genre.
6. I do a new backup of the whole library, now with the first genre ready ID'ed.
7. I remove all tracks except for those in the first and second genre from the library.
8. I set IDs on that (the ID process will now start from the first artist in the second genre since the first genre is filled) and copy the IDs to a field that is retained in tags (probably Custom 3, which I have used for that purpose before).

And so on until all genres are ID'ed. This is slightly laborious but nothing compared to the manual way I did it before. Also, when this is done, I will keep the IDs for quite some time, so albums I add to the library later will just be getting IDs from there and on. I could of course set IDs starting with 2000 on the second genre (by having a dummy album with the ID 1999) to separate the genres more, but that's going a bit to anal, I think.

nila · « **Reply #120 on:** January 08, 2004, 06:14:12 am »

Uck!
Dont do that.

If I knew you were doing all that hassle I'd have done a work around.

Here's what I'll make it do - it'll first work out all the genre's from all your files (this will take a while as there's no way to get a full list of values from MC - I'll have to get all files and then create the list manually).

Then I'll do it genre by genre myself.

Either that or something along those lines.
UCK that sounded painful!

And I did read all the post - just not sure what you mean by wait for:
Media Center [zone]?
Are u watching media center and doing it manually by watching the playing display or what?

Mastiff · « **Reply #121 on:** January 08, 2004, 06:21:11 am »

I haven't started doing it yet, so if you've got a good idea to fix it, I'm all for it. It'll save me lots of work. One idea that may be easier could be (I think somebody mentioned this ablove) to make the plugin only work on the files in playing now. Then I could each genre to playing now in the right order. But an automatic way would of course be easier.

And I mean the caption of the window, the zone will show there. If you minimize MC you'll see something like "Media Center (Zone 1)" on the Windows task bar if there's more than one zone defined. If there's no more than one zone defined you'll only see Media Center.

nila · « **Reply #122 on:** January 08, 2004, 06:29:03 am »

Ah ok - and are you manually just checking the task bar to see what it's saying the new zone or what?

The problem with doing only a selection of files is that an ID could then get duplicated which obv. wouldn't be good

I'll try think of something.

Mastiff · « **Reply #123 on:** January 08, 2004, 06:39:19 am »

No, Girder does the checking. It waits for a window that has the string "Media Center (Zone 1)" (or whatever I have called that zone, one of them is "Media Center (Kevin)") as a window title (I think it's called a caption, not a title, in Girder). All this is fully automatic.

And you're of course right about the problems with double IDs. I'll try to think about something as well, but I think your mind is a lot better than mine when it comes to programming (actually my mind is below moron level when it comes to programming...).

nila · « **Reply #124 on:** January 08, 2004, 07:00:48 am »

k,
I'm gonna have to try work out how to find out what other programs are open then in Visual Basic so I can get the title and check.

nila · « **Reply #125 on:** January 10, 2004, 04:23:23 pm »

Hmm,
seems from what I've found out that making it do this would be pretty tricky.

Unfortunately therefore it wont happen.

Will a basic one that loads up any ID be useful then?

Zarius · « **Reply #126 on:** January 10, 2004, 04:36:02 pm »

Any word on a version of Album ID that has an option for only complete albums yet?

Mastiff · « **Reply #127 on:** January 10, 2004, 04:51:00 pm »

Nila, it's not a problem. I'll do it the manual way that I told you about. I'll just stick with the plug-in as it is now.

nila · « **Reply #128 on:** January 10, 2004, 05:16:29 pm »

Wouldn't find it handy to have a program that you could call directly with an Album ID then to make it play that one?

Zarius - I'll try remember on Monday and do it I just forgot sorry

Mastiff · « **Reply #129 on:** January 11, 2004, 01:40:21 am »

Oh yes, that part would be nice. If it's 100 % stable, of course. In a system with full hands off the computer control anything else would be a disaster.

johnp · « **Reply #130 on:** January 11, 2004, 08:02:49 am »

Quote from: Nila on January 10, 2004, 04:23:23 pm

Hmm,
seems from what I've found out that making it do this would be pretty tricky.

Unfortunately therefore it wont happen.

Will a basic one that loads up any ID be useful then?

I can accomplish what I need using mjextman as posted above. I would't go to any extra trouble for my part.

Thanks,

JP

Zarius · « **Reply #131 on:** January 11, 2004, 07:03:32 pm »

I think a program to play by ID (and by any field, if possible & relatively easy) would be great... should save a lot of playlist creation :)

Zarius · « **Reply #132 on:** January 14, 2004, 02:57:34 pm »

Any info on the complete albums bit? :D
[ don't wanna sound pushy, just want to try the plugin out without labeling all my non-album songs :) ]

Hmm... on further thought... I can just try it out anyway... I can always clear out the albumID field and start again anytime :)

nila · « **Reply #133 on:** January 16, 2004, 01:40:21 pm »

Hey

Updated it.

It can now do complete albums.
I've entered a text field to specify search criteria for what it tags so it'll only tag full albums with the default value in there.
You can however customise it to tag ANY set of values.

I wasn't gonna be able to make it sort them as MC ignores sort commands in the SDK when retrieving files and there is no SDK command to get list of all values in a field so I could manually go through them one by one calling each one then tagging them.

I THINK I have however worked out a way to get around this (other than scanning every single file in the db to get all the values).

I'll TRY to update it on like Monday so that you can set a sort that works too.

For now though you can just call genre by genre manually and tag them

http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/PGSetup.exe

As always, post feedback etc.

Sort HOPEFULLY will work

Mastiff · « **Reply #134 on:** January 16, 2004, 02:34:16 pm »

Nila, you're late!

I have just finished doing it the manual way! But I actually think that this would have crashed in my system anyway, since I have a lot of single artist albums with more than one genre in them (for instance heavy metal albums with ballads, and the ballads are classified as "pop-disco-dance" in my system). Or does it keep albums together and sort them based on the genre of the first track? But I will of course test it to see if I see any glaring bugs.

Zarius · « **Reply #135 on:** January 17, 2004, 07:48:27 am »

Cool... sounds great, downloading now to try it out... looking forward to the sorting :)

Mastiff · « **Reply #136 on:** January 17, 2004, 11:00:57 am »

I needed to do the albums again! It turns out that some albums have a difference in caps and non caps (like "Hooray for Boobies" and "Hooray For Boobies"). MC takes them as one album, so they don't show up in incomplete albums, but the plug-in can't handle them and gives them different IDs.
Anyway, it looks like your new plug-in version works as it should. It only tags the albums that has the written information in them.

I just checked how many albums there were in each genre before I have tagged them again. Then I could se if there were any albums that have this problem since the albums the plug-in is warning me that it's going to tag differs from the number of albums MC reports.

bspachman · « **Reply #137 on:** January 18, 2004, 11:01:49 am »

I can't believe I've missed this thread for so long!!

Nila, you're great!! I've spent hours manually adding an "AlbumIndex" field to all of my tracks, and here you come with a plugin to do it all automatically!

As a future enhancement, how about other kinds of groupings--an "ArtistIndex", an "AlbumArtist (auto)" index, a "GenreIndex", etc.... Sometimes it would be great to fire just a single Artist in the fashion that Mastiff uses.

As my contribution, y'all can avoid needing playlists by creating a custom view scheme & using the TREEPATH modifier with mjextman.exe. I use this method with a Pronto-style remote control and another program called "SuperNudelist" to have all of my albums listed on my touchscreen remote. Combined with a little Girder magic, I can replace a current Playing Now or append to an existing PN.

For example:
1) Created a View Scheme called "AlbumIndex/Album" with the following parameters--
Fields: AlbumIndex, Album
Auto Name: Enabled
Image: Audio
Tree Position: Automatic
Populate Tree: Enabled
Honor Parent Search Strings: Enabled

2) Depending on if I want to Append or Replace PN, I then use Girder to fire the following command(s)--

Code: [Select]

Append:
mjextman.exe /Append TREEPATH=Media Library\Audio\AlbumIndex/Album\[reg1]

Replace:
mjextman.exe /PlayReplace TREEPATH=Media Library\Audio\AlbumIndex/Album\[reg1]

Have fun!
Brad

Mastiff · « **Reply #138 on:** January 18, 2004, 01:33:04 pm »

That's interesting, dude! I'm gonna have a go at that for my carputer. The inhouse system is running so smooth I don't have the guts to touch it.

nila · « **Reply #139 on:** January 20, 2004, 03:03:20 am »

Ok,

So this seems to be working.

So what's left to do?

A proper sort function
Ability to give index's to other groupings? (might be alot trickier but we'll see).

Also I think I have a basic program that can be called to play ID's. I'll probably include it in the setup program.

Anything else?

Mastiff · « **Reply #140 on:** January 20, 2004, 10:30:10 am »

I can't think of anything else, with my new (perfectly functional) paylists I'm where I wanted to go. It did take some time with backing up the library, deleting all genres except for the one I was about to ID (and the already ID'ed genres), running the ID, restoring the full library and finally doing an "update from tags if changed".

One thing, though: I think perhaps the plugin does something with the field Band. It's a field I haven't used ever, and suddenly most of my tracks had the album title in "Band".

nila · « **Reply #141 on:** January 20, 2004, 12:56:41 pm »

Nope, definitely wasn't me.

Didn't tell it to touch the band field at all and at no point does it read in the field either in order to copy it.

Mastiff · « **Reply #142 on:** January 21, 2004, 04:21:46 pm »

OK. Probably just a weird side effect of mass-tagging in MC, then. Or even older tags that I hadn't updated before. I don't know.

Zarius · « **Reply #143 on:** January 21, 2004, 06:41:26 pm »

Hmm... looking through my library I noticed about 10% of the files have the band tag set (most of the time to the same as the artist...), though I haven't touched that tag... so it seems it's used somewhere I guess (though I wonder why it's only 10%... *shrug*)

nila · « **Reply #144 on:** January 22, 2004, 03:04:42 am »

Zarius,

Did you definitely not have any 'Band' tags set before you used the plugin?

I'm definitely not calling ANY information for the 'band' field or trying to set any info for it and at NO point do I even ask MC for the artist name of the files as I dont need it for the plugin.

If the plugin is copying the artist field to the band field it's a bug in MC and it is messing something up, maybe related to the SDK which is why it's appearing after you use the plugin.

If anyone can confirm for definite that this is happening to them only after they use the plugin then let me know and I'll report it as an MC bug.

johnp · « **Reply #145 on:** January 22, 2004, 11:15:24 am »

I just looked at my lib and no files have the band tag set. Must be coming from someplace else???

nila · « **Reply #146 on:** January 22, 2004, 04:23:11 pm »

Thanks for the Confirmation john.

New version uploaded with Sort function.

Pretty sure it works but let me know if it doesn't.

http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/SetupAPG.exe

NOTE: If ALL your fields selected for the sort dont match (ie one of them is off) then it'll sort that album by whichever of the fields comes first (so even if ALL your tracks are 'rock' but ONE is 'britpop' then it'll sort it as B not R).

Sorry but that's the way it works

Might make a plugin to tidy up Albums info but I'm not sure - Pretty sure Album View 2 does it so no point me trying to match something already done excellently.

Let me know of ANY bugs.

the stand alone program will be ready tomorrow too and will work like this:

controlplayingnow.exe ReplaceAndPlay/addToPlaying/addPlayNow fieldName fieldvalue

so you'd write something like this:

controlplayingnow.exe replaceAndPlay playlistID 514

Comments, feedback etc all welcome!

Enjoy!

johnp · « **Reply #147 on:** January 22, 2004, 04:44:27 pm »

looking forward to playing with the next plugin

Zarius · « **Reply #148 on:** January 22, 2004, 07:43:41 pm »

Apologies... I didn't clarify my statement enough :)

I've got 10% of the band tags set... but I've not used the plugin yet :)

Mastiff · « **Reply #149 on:** January 23, 2004, 10:31:58 am »

Nila, can the standalone program be zone specific later on?

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Author Topic: Can somebody please make a playlist creator? (Read 31080 times)

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