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Author Topic: iTunes Playlist Import  (Read 2531 times)

rnbwpnt

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iTunes Playlist Import
« on: August 17, 2009, 02:21:52 am »

I haven't found an idiot-proof guide to importing playlists into MC from iTunes. As you'll see in a sec, this is critically important to me for making a go of MC.

I'm using:
  - iTunes 8.2.1.6
  - a 160g iPod Classic
  - Two major sets of playlists, divided using playlist folders
  - 70636 tracks (with more to come)

The first major division of my collection music, which is subdivided by artist (nested playlist folders) and album (playlists).

The second major division of my collection is mp3 or m4a-format audiobooks. Each author gets a playlist folder. Major series by each author may also get a nested playlist folder; individual books get a playlist. Where appropriate, sorting into correct order is enforced by prefixing digits, like so:

King, Stephen -> The Dark Tower ->
01 - The Gunslinger (Guidell)
02 - The Drawing of the Three
03 - The Waste Lands
04 - Wizard and Glass

and so on. Individual files are likewise prefixed with a track number to force correct sorting. Depending on the book, there can be well over 1000 tracks (the two largest off the top of my head are Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, at 1639 and 1429 respectively, and there are several more 1000+ books in there).

An average iPod sync will touch on the order of 20,000 tracks as I add and remove books.

This setup pretty much mirrors file storage on my hard drive. Altogether, the mp3 collection is almost 300g. As we all know, iTunes bogs down horribly with a collection of this size, and so switching stuff on and off the iPod can literally take 12 hours.

So far, the fastest way I've found to mirror my playlist and folder setup in MC14 is to simply do it manually, again. It's a little faster than doing it with iTunes, if only because I can use F8 and F10 to create playlists and folders. Even so, when you have literally hundreds upon hundreds of folders and playlists, this is ... suboptimal.

My digging through the archives here and elsewhere indicates that if I import a library.xml generated by iTunes, I get the library, but not the playlists.

Is there a good solution here? Or am I in for another 18 hours of drag-and-drop hell?

Thanks.
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MrHaugen

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #1 on: August 17, 2009, 06:01:15 am »

And you're absolutely sure you want to keep all the playlists? The huge advantage with MC is that you can use different library fields to reach much of the same goals. You can even make you're own fields if the necessary ones are not there. If you're dependant of static playlists I'm afraid you'll end up loosing some functionality. I did not completely understand you're use of the playlists, but I do believe you'd be much better off dropping the static playlists, use pane view to get to the same data, and use smartlists if you need to have some lists at all.

I haven't used playlists for years, except when I'm making a party playlists for my demanding guests.
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jack wallstreet

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #2 on: August 17, 2009, 07:31:12 am »

I have found this free third part plugin works very well for maintaining the MC playlists in Itunes. 

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=51734.0
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John

rnbwpnt

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #3 on: August 17, 2009, 07:39:53 am »

I'm sure that what I want at this second is to mirror as much of my iTunes setup as is reasonable to expect, because I want to minimize the learning curve. I feel like my media collection is so large, doing any kind of wholesale transformation without time to experiment on subsets is unwise, but I'm also unable to continue using iTunes if I want to do anything like ... you know ... listen to music or hear a book sometime this week.

It's pretty obvious that MC will do lots of stuff, but for me, today, with the limited amount of time and computing power I have to invest in this project, what I want is a place to start from a known starting point, and then migrate to a better way of doing things as I have time and inclination.

Re MCiS: It seems to go from MC to iTunes. I'm coming the other direction.
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MrHaugen

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #4 on: August 17, 2009, 09:23:09 am »

What exactly does you're playlist structure contain? What do you gain out of it? I'm asking simply because it would make it easier for us to give you pointers. There might be an easier way of doing this than exporting all the lists maby.
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rnbwpnt

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #5 on: August 18, 2009, 05:51:26 am »

The playlists are arranged thus:

Level 1: Two major divisions, represented by two playlist folders, "Music" and "Audiobooks."

Level 2 (music): Each band or artist has a playlist folder.

Level 3 (music): Generally, each album or release has a playlist. A few exceptions exist: Fan club releases for one band are dumped onto a single list; a few singles I've bought here and there are on a special "singles" list.

Level 2 (audiobooks): Each author has a playlist folder.

Level 3 (audiobooks): Major series by a single author has a playlist folder AND/OR each book has a playlist. Where appropriate, the playlist names are prefixed with one or more digits to force them to sort into the correct order.

Level 4 (audiobooks): Each book has a playlist. Where appropriate, the playlist names are prefixed with one or more digits to force them to sort into the correct order.

The files AND tags are prefixed with a number to force sorting. For music, usually it's just a two-digit number, eg 01 02 03 04.  For audiobooks, it's a number in the format <Track>-<Number> where "number" is the number of tracks in the book. Eg 238-339 is track 238 of a 339-track book.
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MrHaugen

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #6 on: August 18, 2009, 06:40:47 am »

If you manage to find a application that can transfer you're playlists, the things described below can be more simplified. But if you got a fairly good naming system and tag data on you're files this can also be done pretty fast manually.

How much of this do you have in some kind of tag? As I can see you use the following: "Audio type" (music & audio books), Artist, Band, Album, Name, Track, Audio Book name (name) or Series, prefix numbers (track and total tracks).

If all, or most of this is either represented in tags, the file name it self or can be separated with a directory structure, you'll have a pretty easy job of importing it and get the same system as you use today. Not with playlists, but a well organized library with tags. Most Playlists CAN be created after this have been done, but would bring little to no functionality.

One example: Your Audio books and Music are separated by different folders. You have the Artist/Band, Album, name and series tag in iTunes.

- Start off by importing the structure with Audio Books. Set Media Sub Type to Audiobooks. It's now separated from music when you import that. If you're lucky enough to have both the number prefixes, author and series/name in the file names, use Get tags from filenames and fill them all in. You'll have to make a custom field with Author first. If you're missing Author you might have to sort the tracks on file path and set the Authors accordingly. This might take some time depending on the amount on authors, but should be fairly doable. If the series/name data is stored in series tag from iTunes, it will show up in MC as well. Total track numbers can probably be found with a Expression field, but I don't know how.

- Then import the music structure. If all correct fields have been used in iTunes, there should be little you need to do here.


It all depends on how well you have done the tagging and file renaming from the start really. Therefore I might be really off here. It's just a "in the best case" suggestion I guess.
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JimH

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Re: iTunes Playlist Import
« Reply #7 on: August 18, 2009, 07:29:24 am »

Thanks, MrHaugen, for such a good description of how to do this.
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