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[Mitch Sowden]

I THINK that MC could do a better job (lead the way against other product) at managing playlists from a user perspective. The technical components are there already – in fact I think it’s too powerful already – e.g. I’m scared to really get into smart lists due to concern that I loose data / content so I admit to not having experimented enough on the technical / data base / library tools MC has.
No, my problem is the problem between the seat and the keyboard and how do you resolve that the simplest way so that I can become moderately proficient in managing playlists. My two key issues are:
1.   In the Wiki there is very little newbie info on how to USE, optimise and manage playlists – really only how to export them. (leading to my second issue) I think Playlists potentially are very powerful but I don’t have an idiots guide and every product has propriety info on how to use “theirs” – I think they should be more universal.
2.   I have a number of computers in my life not all belonging to me but I am the de-facto support for them. I have diligently “backed-up” my playlists (MPL) and other peoples over the years but after pc changes those “backed up” playlists are useless to me. (In my expectation I should be able to “import” a playlist backed up on an old machine and as long as that "song" (not file mark you - a bit like how Shazam can ID a song) is available somehow to MC then that song should be able to be played after import. Even better, take “my” playlist on a USB stick to my friend’s place – import the playlist and play the songs if those songs are on that machine.
I even installed an XML editor as suggested on the Wiki and can now see how I should edit playlists – but that is not going to help my friends and family out there and I think too manual and complicated across multiple computers. Yes maybe my expectations are high but I think it very likely in the future that I will move my playlists around rather than my actual music files… My biggest problem these days is choosing what to listen to and due to the problems listed above I have not put a great effort into creating playlists as I cannot transport them universally around (easily)
This has bothered me moderately for years now and I am now resolved to improve the situation. I have seen there is even a 3rd party product that claims to help (Sprintbit Playlist Manager) but I’d rather not install another app and its untested to me. As I said, I think MC / JRiver could do a better job on this but maybe I have not read the right forum posting where this is explained to newbies? (Best I could find was “need help managing” Dec 25 2011 by ashbel but that’s not what I was asking.)
What I’d like to ask is:
1.   Let those who know, point out the places I have not looked where the answers even partial are available on the existing Wiki content.
2.   Someone technical (adv user or from the dev team respond) on potential better USER functionality to manage the end users playlists (across other MC computers, devices etc) and comment if there is a business case to develop in that area. BTW Play Doctor is awesome feature… Thanks Mitch

[MrC]

In most media software, playlists are simple references to existing file names or internally managed objects.  That is files first, playlists second.

What you're suggesting is playlists first, files second.  Somehow, you'd like playlists and the media software to go find that music.  So, how can it do this?

  1. By exact or fuzzy matches of file names
  2. By exact or fuzzy matches of meta data (i.e. tags)
  3. By audio analysis matching algorithms

It is pretty safe to say that (1) is unlikely to happen, as user's naming and storage schemes are as disparate as human language.  And (2) requires user's to determine which meta data should be matched minimally, but the general case is that user's meta data is typically worse than (1).  So we're left with (3), which requires users on their systems to have already run the software to do analysis, and it must match the same used by MC.

So, its a tall order.

If you want others to hear your music, create not only a playlist, but also bring along the media files themselves which are referenced by the playlists.  Use standard, common formats utilized by your friends/families media software.

There's nothing to be afraid of with Smartlists - they don't / won't damage your media files.  They are just playlists that use rules to determine how to populate the list, rather than static lists you manually create.  These are easy to experiment with.

[Mitch Sowden]

Thank you MrC - you summed it up exactly right " Somehow, you'd like playlists and the media software to go find that music." Yes exactly. Option 3 I think. And with the problem caused by "as user's naming and storage schemes are as disparate as human language" I also agree that this does not exist currently (or would be too expensive to implement a Shazam type solution) but I do think we will and need to move away soon from the "static" mapping between playlist and files to something more dynamic with less user overhead. Are we looking at the problem wrong way round perhaps...

MC has a great search feature - instead of bringing a "playlist" on a USB stick, can't see bring an "automatic search list" on a USB stick (I guess your option 2) but perhaps the list has been somehow extracted from one the "cleaned" internet music databases somehow? i.e when I want to build the playlist of the future I click on the song playing on my computer that I want to include and it does a lookup to an internet database (that subscribes to some sort of standard) and then adds the "cleaned" song meta data to the new "automatic search list" on my USB stick. When I take that to my friends house, the MC there does a special "closest match" search and builds a playlist on that machine. it skips the songs it either knows are not on that machine or ones it cant match. If it was even 80 % successful (assuming the files live on the target machine) that would be great!

In my situation I can control common standard formats even file structures at my friends & family but I agree as a commercial product to get it to work on a poorly managed file system with in consistent naming structures, downloaded music etc would require the full blown option 3 (audio analysis) and a lot of development time.

In any case thank you for clarifying that my expectations of the current functionality in MC and the use of playlists are too high - and saving me a lot of time in fruitless searching for an unachievable task! I really appreciate the time you took to reply and you understood my requirement 100%.