INTERACT FORUM
Windows => Third Party Plug-ins, Programs, and Skins => Topic started by: Mastiff on December 25, 2003, 06:59:00 pm
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I moved this from the other plug-in forum, this is probably the correct place to have it...
I'm a man of small demands (well, OK, maybe not, but this one shouldn't be so bad). There is one thing I would like to have, and maybe it can be used by other people as well if they want to IR automate their multi-zone (or even single-zone) system: A plugin that creates playlists with consecutive numbers based on the criteria you choose. My choice would be Genre/Artist/Album. In other words it would on my system start with Alternative rock/A Perfect Circle/Mer de Noms as play list number one, Alternative rock/Bloodhound Gang/Hooray for Boobies as playlist number two and so on until it ended with the last numbered playlist being Verbal Humour/Wesensteen/Wesensteen 2 (norwegian verbal humour, very funny but totally norwegian...)
Is this difficult, or is it something somebody could whip up in a jiffy? I'm hoping, this is, after all, the season for gifts... ;D
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Doesn't sound too hard but I'm not following what u want exactly :)
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Thanks a lot for looking at this, Nila! I'll try to clearify: The plugin will go through the collection in a pre-determied order (preferably Genre/Artist/Album) and give each post (album name) a unique number, starting with 1 on the first and going all the way up (to almost 3000 in my case). It will then create play lists based on that number, so I can export them (maybe that's not necessary, maybe we can just use a field not used for anything else, like comment 2 - but I'm afraid it will play 2, 12,20, 21 and so on in that case - if we don't put something in fron of and after, like this: $1$, $2$, $3$. In that case it might work, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, the whole point being that I can print out a list afterwards with genres, artists and album names (by using a smartlist that only prints out the first track of each album, but without track name and number - only genre, artist and album. I have one like that at home, but right now I'm on a Christmas visit to my parents). Then that list can be used as basis for calling up the play lists from IR remotes around the house. Right now, if I press "666" I get Mercyful Fate's "Don't Break the Oath" for instance.
Do you follow me now?
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Kind of, I'm a bit slow :)
You want the plugin to go through your whole library and give each album a unique number so you can call that album with the unique number from your remote.
You also want to be able to print a list of all these album names with their number so you have a paper lookup list for all the albums.
You want it to sort the list by Genre then Artist then Album name before assigning these numbers.
Not sure what you mean by the whole $ thing or the whole export thing vs field thing?
lol. I'm not following it too well I know - maybe it's just too early for me or I'm still tooo spaced out from christmas.
The only real bit I get is that you want each album to be given a unique number that you can use from your remote to call it and you want a list with all the album names and their numbers on it.
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You got the essence of it, Nila! ;D I'm probably bad at explaining, it's not your Christmas head, it's mine... The reason for me to use $1$ is that if you only use for instance Comment=2 in Media Center you'll get all albums that contains the number 2 in the comment field, not just the correct one. So if the plug-in exports play lists it's not a problem since I can call the m3u playlists directly from the OS, but if it relies on direct play from the field value in MC it needs something that stops it from adding all tracks with the number 2 somewhere in the comment field (which could be quite a lot...).
Thanks again!
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Yeah ok.
So would you rather it export them as playlists to a given location or would you rather it saved them to a field?
Ur best bet would be to create a custom field called: Album Number and to then just have it save them to this field.
That way it would ONLY be this data in the field gauranteed and it'd make it very easy to see, manage etc.
Would also make it easy to generate the info pages to display.
my XML is awful but I'm pretty sure you could use the XML export plugin to export this field along with the album name to give you your print out list.
Throwing together a plugin that just gives each unique album it's own ID number should only take like 30 mins and I'll try do it tonight. From there we can work on making it work better as we'll both be looking at the same screen :)
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Thank you, thank you, thank you! ;D ;D ;D
You're very kind! I'll probably see it tomorrow morning my time since I believe you're in the US. I'll PM you my e-mail address.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you! ;D ;D ;D
You're very kind! I'll probably see it tomorrow morning my time since I believe you're in the US. I'll PM you my e-mail address.
Please, no insults!!
UK BABY!!!!
Not US!
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Sorry, old chum. Won't happen again. I often assume that anyody without a location in their message are american. And I mess up my boards. Here we only show location in profiles. UK, eh? Going there in two months (to Devon) to pick up my third english mastiff pup in 15 years. God shave the queen! ;D
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Thanks a lot for looking at this, Nila! I'll try to clearify: The plugin will go through the collection in a pre-determied order (preferably Genre/Artist/Album) and give each post (album name) a unique number, starting with 1 on the first and going all the way up (to almost 3000 in my case). It will then create play lists based on that number, so I can export them (maybe that's not necessary, maybe we can just use a field not used for anything else, like comment 2 - but I'm afraid it will play 2, 12,20, 21 and so on in that case - if we don't put something in fron of and after, like this: $1$, $2$, $3$. In that case it might work, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, the whole point being that I can print out a list afterwards with genres, artists and album names (by using a smartlist that only prints out the first track of each album, but without track name and number - only genre, artist and album. I have one like that at home, but right now I'm on a Christmas visit to my parents). Then that list can be used as basis for calling up the play lists from IR remotes around the house. Right now, if I press "666" I get Mercyful Fate's "Don't Break the Oath" for instance.
Do you follow me now?
This sounds pretty easy to do with XSLT. You could use Scott_r.'s "MC XML Export" plugin (which I think is real close to seeing a "final" release) to apply an XSLT that creates a playlist of your choice.
I'm not familiar with playlists, though... other than MC's Media Playlist (MPL) which isn't really a playlist. And I'm not around MC at the moment. What does a playlist look like? I'm going out on a limb and guessing it is text-based (which is why XSLT is a good solution). If so, you would have essentially a "one-click" solution with MCXMLExport's presets, which would export the library as an MPL, apply an XSLT transformation to convert the MPL to the text-based playlist, save the playlist, and then automatically launch a MC import of the saved playlist.
Using XSLT, you will have much more control of how *you* want to present the playlist (as HTML, let's assume). You don't have to be an XSLT expert to understand how to modify it.
If you give me a short sample of the playlist (that imports into MC), I'll put together an XSLT that creates it. If you give me an HTML example of how you want to present the playlist as HTML, I'll put together an XSLT that renders it. If you want to know more about XML, XSLT, and MC, wait a day or two and I'll have a "primer" ready.
All told, it would probably take me an hour or two to create the playlist and HTML. But I need examples. Let me know.
Scott-
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No, I want to use M3U play lists (I belive WinAmp began those). And yes, they are text based. They're basically the path and the file name. Here's the full content of number 666 in my system:
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\01 - A Dangerous Meeting.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\02 - Nightmare.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\03 - Desecration of Souls.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\04 - Night of the Unborn.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\05 - The Oath.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\06 - Gypsy.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\07 - Welcome Princess of Hell.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\08 - To One Far Away.mp3
F:\Heavy metal\Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath\09 - Come to the Sabbath.mp3
But can this export program give unique sequential numbers to each album? I'm not talking about creating one play list, but around 2500 automatically.
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But can this export program give unique sequential numbers to each album? I'm not talking about creating one play list, but around 2500 automatically.
So each album is its own playlist? Is the name of the playlist just a number?
Scott-
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Yes. As I said earlier in this thread it's so I can call albums from IR remotes. Oh, and it should be selective, if possible, so I can choose what albums to do it with. It's not a good idea to have all playlist numbers change every time I add albums. That will drive my wife and kids up the wall... ::)
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ok,
I got the basic thing working.
It'll save the album ID into any field you specify.
Each time you run the plugin it just incrementally add's a new ID to any albums found without an ID so it wont ever overwrite any albums, just keeps your whole DB with an album ID.
I'll work on the stupid setup program soon :)
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Yo da man, Nila! Thanks! Does this mean that I'll use the plugin for putting in the numbers and then this XML export stuff to export them as playlists?
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Yo da man, Nila! Thanks! Does this mean that I'll use the plugin for putting in the numbers and then this XML export stuff to export them as playlists?
OK... So Nila gives you the plugin that creates an AlbumID - and maybe he'll (as quickly!) fill in the rest: creating a playlist for each AlbumID.
My solution would have been to generate the AlbumID on the fly - it wouldn't matter if it changes each time you "generate playlists", so long as the playlists match the number.
I'll wait to see if Nila fills in the rest of the plugin... no sense in both of us working on the same thing.
Scott-
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Yes, that's my point. It would matter since when my wife's used to playing Celine Dion on a particular number - if that suddenly gives her doom metal, she'd kill me... ;)
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It would kinda matter if they changed every time.
You'd get used to certain albums being on certain numbers and each time a new list was printed it'd change which would make it impossible to get used to any of the albums numbers or become familiar with it.
Ok, so this thing now gives each album a unique ID - is that enough for you or do you want it to also export the playlist for each album to a .m3u playlist?
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Yes, that's my point. It would matter since when my wife's used to playing Celine Dion on a particular number - if that suddenly gives her doom metal, she'd kill me... ;)
I get it... Cool: Nila created a way to AutoNumber Albums. This guarantees that it serves as a primary key that never changes.
I wonder if anyone has a need for AutoNumbering tracks as well. It might make sense if someone wanted to create a copy of the database, like perhaps in the thread [url[http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=17134[/url]
Scott-
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Does this mean that I'll use the plugin for putting in the numbers and then this XML export stuff to export them as playlists?
The current version of XSLT doesn't support the ability to create multiple output documents. There are extensions that support it, but the built-in processor that comes with IE6 doesn't. This means that most users wouldn't be able to create multiple output documents unless they downloaded another XSLT processor - which is probably more than most would want to do. I've asked Scott_r if he can support extensions in his MCXMLExport plugin. If he can, XSLT is a good way to solve this problem.
But I'm betting that Nila is going to produce a complete solution in the very near future!
Scott-
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Hey Scott,
The plugin gives the album's ID numbers and it'd be easy now to just output the names to an output box too that could then be copied to an excel file.
XSLT though would definitely be better as it'd give it a much prettier appearance.
Would it be hard to do one that'd just output this info with the albumID?
Otherwise I'll do it so it exports to Excel or something.
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Hey Scott,
The plugin gives the album's ID numbers and it'd be easy now to just output the names to an output box too that could then be copied to an excel file.
XSLT though would definitely be better as it'd give it a much prettier appearance.
Would it be hard to do one that'd just output this info with the albumID?
Otherwise I'll do it so it exports to Excel or something.
Yes, the XSLT for the presentation would be really simple - and I'd gladly do that. But I thought Mastiff was saying that he needed to create the actual playlists - one file per AlbumID, with all the Album's tracks in the playlist.
Scott-
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I think I am looking for something similar if not the same, see;
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18009
where is the plugin you are describing and would it work for what I have in mind from the above thread?
Tim T.
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Scott, that's correct. But I can also use the number internally in MC if there is a way to stop a press of 2 from giving me all albums with the number 2 in it, like 2, 22, 222, 20, 12 and so on. Is this possible in any way? Nila, what about my suggestion to add a $ or another special sign on both sides of the number? Or won't that work either? Will MC still take all albums with the number 2 in the ID?
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mastiff - if you set the rule up to make it something lilke:
albumid=[2] then it'd just do it with exactly the number 2 in it.
Wouldn't that work?
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Yes, as long as there's a way to call that number from Girder. So far I've used playlists and simply made Girder change to the correct zone and execute the playlist. But if there's a way to let Girder change to the correct zone and then play the album with that number (in the correct track order), than that's more than enough for me. ;D
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hmm, I dont really know much about what Girder can do.
I think this is the point where we have to work out how Girder can interact with MC so I then know what I need to make this plugin do.
Exporting to .m3u's is possible just alot slower than simply setting a tag.
Want me to just make it do that then or what?
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If you mean longer in the sense that it takes some time to do the process on my computer, that's not a problem at all. In that case please do! If it takes longer to program, that's up to you if you think you've got the time for it. :)
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You want them as Media Jukebox playlists or as physical playlists on your computer?
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Talk about service, dude! ;D Eventually I want them as physical (can you say that about data?) play lists on my harddisk, but it really does not matter much how you do it since MC can do "export all playlists" and send them to the Data/Playlists directory under the MC main directory.
Thanks again!
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Hey guys, another member of ours may be onto something already. See the tail end of the thread I started over here;
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18009
The link supplied did exactly what I wanted.
http://welcome.to/toytools
Big Thumbs Up to milehigh!
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Nope, totally useless. It uses the directory name as the name of the play list, wich means that I have to go through 2500 playlists and rename them from Artist - Album.m3u to 1-2500 m3u. Sorry, but that's a totally different cup of tea. I have seen that stuff before, but it just isn't of any use when you're talking system automation.
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ok it's done.
Exports the .m3u playlists to a folder of your choice using the naming scheme of your choice.
Setup to follow today for testing.
Hope it works.
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Ok.
Early beta is up - had no time to test installer so own peril etc. etc.
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/SetupAPG.exe
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Ok.
Early beta is up - had no time to test installer so own peril etc. etc.
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/SetupAPG.exe
Uh, oh... I get an Information dialog saying "Interface Plug-in 'Album Playlist Generator' could not be found or created'".
Scott-
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Same here. ? :'(
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Both have VB6 runtimes installed I take it?
I have NO idea what it is that makes that happen.
It seems to happen with all my plugins :(
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Someone said the installer might not be working properly registering the ocx.
Can you browse to the installation directory in a dos prompt and type in:
regsvr32 AlbumIDGenerator.ocx
Then see if that works?
If it doesn't then AFTER that double click the .reg file in the install dir.
If it still doesn't work tell me.
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I did a regserv32 on the ocx which got things going....
(http://foc.no-ip.com/pics/apg.jpg)
Seems to be working OK, I'll know for sure when MC's done updating 12,000 files with the new info. (my fault, not the plugins)!
marko's tip: don't save this field data to file by default, LOL
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http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/Deployment.exe
If it still DOESN'T work try installing that in the same dir.
see if that helps.
Can u not do that thou till AFTER u try the other things so I know whats causin the problems
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After doing the regserver thing I had two plugins, Album ID Generator and the one that appeared right after the original install. That one I deleted, and from then and on it was almost all smooth sailing! It set the ID correctly on 2465 albums (that I had in an older library on the laptop, using this as a test case). But when I chose to create playlists, it created 2465 empty playlists! Turned out that since these files were offline, this happened. When I tried with 8 albums I had on the laptop, it both created the IDs and the correct playlists!
For my part the plug-in is right where I need it, so you don't have to develop it further for my sake. But if you do, I have three suggestions:
1. When the albumID field isn't yet created, it answers that all albums have IDs. Perhaps it should say "albumID field not found" or something like that? Or even better, if possible: "albumID field not found - do you wish to create it and the proceed?"
2. Either make it create those play lists directly off the library, so it does not matter if they're offline, or a warning insted of the empty playlists.
3. The ability to export every post in Genre/Artist/Album/Album ID to one file for printout. But this is the least important since a smartlist will do it nicely.
Brilliant piece of work, Nila! Exactly what I wanted, so thank you very, very, very much, and happy new year! ;D ;D ;D ;D
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I too am interested in this plugin... a question first:
-does this just find -all- unique albums and assign the number? Or can it be set to just complete albums? I have 182 'complete' albums... but 960 'unique' album tags... so I'd only want to 'complete' albums.
I'd also like to do this on a track by track basis... assign a unique number to every track, then when I import new ones it could assign a new unique number to them. This would be an easy start (I'd eventually like to have/make an onscreen one, so you don't -have- to print it out) on my 'Jukebox Plugin' (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=17937) idea - if I could print out the list with two album covers side by side and the track details in between them (ala Jukebox) and have the unique numbers next to each track/album, one could type the numbers into the remote and queue up individual tracks, or a complete album (if one wants to allow full album queuing... eg you may not want to at a party, since that would allow too much hogging). As for differentiating between the album number and the track number, one may be able to set Girder up to make albums start with an certain button, eg on my remote the star (*) key would be good, then type the number and hash (#) to finish [ that way you don't need to type 000001 for the first album/track :) ].
I'll look into ways of making Girder work this way with MC as well.
Hopefully I can work out a way that doesn't need playlists, otherwise it would get real messy with track id's :)
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Mastiff,
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/AlbumIDGenerator.ocx
Download that, overright your installed one. Run regsrv on it.
It has the first 2 of your 3 points.
I dont quite understand what u mean by: Genre/artist/album/album id
do u just mean: [Genre] - [artist] - [album] - [album id] ?
like as if it was an excel file with 4 columns with a big list?
Zarius - urs sounds a wee bit more complex so I'll look at it tomorrow :)
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Nila, yes. So I can print out, look through a genre to find an artist and then the album. Of course it would be nice if genre was just a heading, so we'd have one line with genre and then a row with artists, albums and their IDs.
When I chose to export playlists of off line tracks with the new version it did not give any warnings, it just didn't create any lists. Is that the way you made it, or is there something weird on my system?
Zarius, you don't have to press any leading zeros if you use the same playlist selecter GML that I use. You'll find a link to it on my homepage. And I'll soon have a new section up about using your plug-in, Nila! ;D
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Thats the way I made it without a warning.
Just before it writes the playlist it checks to see if it has any content to write, if it doesn't then it just doesn't write the file.
I guess I could add some kind of check but having a msgbox appear each time an album was offline might be a pain.
Doing what u said shouldn't be too hard.
I'll just have to look into how to write data into excel format so I can just make it export it to excel.
sraymond might be able to do this though with an XSLT which would probably be a better solution though as it's designed specifically for visual appearance which is what you want for this.
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Actually to export it to plain text separated with something ($, £, whatever) would do heaps. Then I could do the rest in autoformat in Word. I prefer that to Excel.
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Actually to export it to plain text separated with something ($, £, whatever) would do heaps. Then I could do the rest in autoformat in Word. I prefer that to Excel.
Have you tried out XAlbum? It comes packaged with Scott_r.,s "MC XML Export" plugin and there's a preset for GenreAlbumGroup. It's pretty easy to customize just by changing some variables declared at the beginning - or you could let me know what specific changes you want and I could do it for you.
You might also look at the thread http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18012 (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18012) and see if that does close to what you want. It's a pretty simple XSLT that you might even be able to modify yourself. Or... let me know what you want changed and I'll do it.
From my perspective, XML and XSLT would make your life much easier. Instead of getting the data (content) into Word and then massaging how you'd like to finalize the presentation, you could automatically convert the data (the XML document) into the desired presentation (determined by the XSLT document) with the click of a mouse (using MCXMLExport).
Scott-
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Sraymond, this stuff is really beautiful! I'm impressed over what I can export here, and believe me, I'm always looking for stuff that makes my life easier! The problem is of course that these presets are too advanced for the stuff I want to do. If youy've got the time, I'd love to have a very simple preset, looking like this:
Genre
Artist - Album (Album ID)
Artist 1 - Album 1 (1)
Artist 1 - Album 2 (2)
Artist 2 - Album 1 (3)
And so on. This would be easy to print out. The only quirk: I do not want to print out compilation albums (any albums with multiple artists). For those I would like this scheme:
Album (Album ID)
Album 1 (2578)
Album 2 (2579)
And so on. Would this be possible, perhaps even easy? Thanks again!
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Nila, trying to install the Album ID Generator on the main MC computer (the HTPC) with the latest installer didn't work at all in the plug-in department. The installer program says that it's done, and I get no error messages, the just ain't there under the plugin-manager or the plug-in part of the three. I'll re-download the first version and install that to see if it helps. I have tried the regserv part se well.
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Hey :)
The last package I gave a link to as a last resort has to be used AFTER the first package has been used.
It doesn't install the registry settings or register the ocx.
If you want to use it with JUST this last one then you have to double click the .reg file that gets installed and also do regsrv on it then it should get working.
If not let me know
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Sraymond, this stuff is really beautiful! I'm impressed over what I can export here, and believe me, I'm always looking for stuff that makes my life easier! The problem is of course that these presets are too advanced for the stuff I want to do. If youy've got the time, I'd love to have a very simple preset, looking like this:
Genre
Artist - Album (Album ID)
Artist 1 - Album 1 (1)
Artist 1 - Album 2 (2)
Artist 2 - Album 1 (3)
And so on. This would be easy to print out. The only quirk: I do not want to print out compilation albums (any albums with multiple artists). For those I would like this scheme:
Album (Album ID)
Album 1 (2578)
Album 2 (2579)
And so on. Would this be possible, perhaps even easy? Thanks again!
Possible and easy!
I just need to be clear on what you expect for an output. It only needs to be a text document? No fancy presentation such as HTML, color, italics, etc? No paging?
Can you describe "compilation albums" better? How do you know there are multiple artists? Is it because the [Album Artist (auto)] is "Various"? Are you saying that the compilation albums should be at the end (after all the Artists are listed)?
Was the ArtistAlbumListing pretty close?
Scott-
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Nila, it worked when I installed the first one and did a re-register with regserver. ;D
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sraymond, if possible I would like printer friendly HTML, in other words with bold Genres in a font a few points larger, preferably on the top of every page, A4 format, no colors (I will use a laser printer anyway).
As for compilation albums the [Album Artist (auto)] is (Multiple artists), not various.
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Mastiff,
You didn't answer the question:
Are you saying that the compilation albums should be at the end (after all the Artists are listed)?
And one big long HTML table is sufficient? Off the top of my head, I think a <thead> element is repeated on every printed page.
Scott-
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sraymond, if possible I would like printer friendly HTML, in other words with bold Genres in a font a few points larger, preferably on the top of every page, A4 format, no colors (I will use a laser printer anyway).
As for compilation albums the [Album Artist (auto)] is (Multiple artists), not various.
Care to give me an example of the HTML? Are you familiar with CSS?
Scott-
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Oh, I'm sorry. :-[ Yes, it would be nice to have them at the end. I sort of thought that it was necessary to make two printouts, one for compilations and one for regular. But if everything can be done in one sweep, nothing's better than that.
CSS? HTML? If you've seen my webpage you'd know that I can barely reach Macromedia Dreamweaver 101... But it would be nice to have it formatted partly like I showed you above:
Genre
Artist - Album (Album ID)
Artist 1 - Album 1 (1)
Artist 1 - Album 2 (2)
Artist 2 - Album 1 (3)
In other words Genre in bold, preferably a few points larger (maybe 12 as opposed to 10, I don't want the printout to take too many pages) and the cloumn heading in italics, perhaps a few points larger as well. And finally (I just remembered this) underlining of the full row to make it easier to separate the row from each others with a quick glance. Am I making any sense here? I hope so... ;)
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Nila, I found one thing when I was about to begin ID-ing the main library: It seems that ID Generator treats all media files alike. So I started to ID my digital photos as well. Is it possible to limit it to MP3's?
Also, as it is now, it seems like it runs through the library alphabetically, sorted by "Album artist (auto)". So it starts with (Multiple artists) and stops with Åge Aleksandersen (norwegian adult orientated rock). Is it possible to run through the library in a genre/Album artist (auto) order instead? Then "Alternative rock" will be the first genre in my library, and Verbel humor is the last, and within genres the playlists will be in Album artist (auto) sequence. In that order it's possible to flick through for instance a lot of heavy metal or pop albums by using the "next playlist" command in my Girder GML. Or is that to complicated because of multi genre albums?
Then, for another suggestion: The ability to force it to start on a particular number. For instance, so I can have my audio books on 9000 and up, away from the music. But I guess this is a bit more difficult. So this is just a suggestion, not even as strong as a request.
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But it would be nice to have it formatted partly like I showed you above:
Genre
Artist - Album (Album ID)
Artist 1 - Album 1 (1)
Artist 1 - Album 2 (2)
Artist 2 - Album 1 (3)
In other words Genre in bold, preferably a few points larger (maybe 12 as opposed to 10, I don't want the printout to take too many pages) and the cloumn heading in italics, perhaps a few points larger as well. And finally (I just remembered this) underlining of the full row to make it easier to separate the row from each others with a quick glance. Am I making any sense here? I hope so... ;)
OK... I put together a quick HTML. To finish polishing it, could you please give me an MPL with just the fields in the output (Genre, Artist, Album Artist (auto), Album, AlbumID)? Zip up the MPL and e-mail it to me at scottraymond@sbcglobal.net
I don't know how to just underline the cells in an HTML table. I'd suggest alternating the background of every-other-row, but if you're going to print it out that might not be too desirable. I'll try to bone up a little bit on HTML tomorrow and see if I can figure out table borders.
Yikes! 1:30am... after last night's New Year's bash, my circadian clock is all screwed up!
Scott-
-
Eh...I would like to, but what is an MPL? This is really getting embarassing!
No, scratch that. I found it, it's a play list format... It will arrive shortly.
As for alternating colors, that could work if we were alternating between white and very light grey. That could actually be pretty nice, come to think of it!
I'm at work here (it's 10.30 or so in the morning), but the work goes slow and slightly unconcentrated. Having a week off sure can affect performance when you're not used to having more than two days off in a row...
-
Hi,
I've just started reading this thread. Very cool ideas here.
Tor, I like your implementation of IR remote control, and I see how this plug in really makes that a even better solution. Very elegant and cost effective. I hope you don't mind if I use parts of it myself.
Looks great so far. I'm going to try it out and see how she goes.
Thanks,
John
-
No problemo, John. When this is all done and ready for prime time, I'll make a page on it on my website and a link to it in the MC, AVS and Girder forums. ;D
-
Here are my initial results.
I installed plugin and had similar problems as others... Had manually register ocx and manually delete the extra plugin.
Once I figured out how to create the AlbumID field, (OK, so I'm sort of a MC newbie) I had no problem generating the Albums ID's and playlists. Very cool, and I can't wait for the hardcopy print out part. Which makes nme think, couldn't we also just post htis same html on a local web server so all PC/PPC devices on the LAN could browse the list? That would be pretty neat.
Then the trouble starts... Whe I try to load a m3u file, I get an error message from MC that says:
"Error restoring license: Invalid file type [M:\Data\Playlists\100.m3u]"
This seems to be a problem with MC in general not this plugin or anything else related to this thread, but since I'm here I thought you all might know why this is. I did go to the file types area in setup and select m3u files. No joy.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
John
Edit-- I just went to windows and registered the file type to Music Match, then went back to MC file types unregistered it and re-registered it and all is well. This is actually very cool. Great work you guys!
Thanks...
-
So has everyone managed to get this plugin working simply by manually registering the ocx??
If this is the case I know that the installer is simply messing up and so I can just try to fix the installer so it does it properly.
Is this whats happening?
-
Yes, at least for my part...on two different computers.
-
That was the case for me as well. Also had to delete the second instance of the plugin after the manual ocx registration.
JP
-
As for alternating colors, that could work if we were alternating between white and very light grey. That could actually be pretty nice, come to think of it!
OK. Consider it done.
Scott-
-
Ok,
Seeing as you both had problems could you both do me a big favour and be my testers :)
Browse to the install dir and unregister the file by typing:
regsvr32 -u AlbumIDGenerator.ocx
Then run the uninstall program.
Then run the installer again and see if you get the same problem - hopefully you will.
Uninstall it again then download and run:
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/SetupAPG-new.exe
That's a new installer in which HOPEFULLY everything is working fine.
IF it doesn't give u the same problem again after u unregister and re-install could u also let me know as I really need to try to isolate whats causing the problem.
Either way though - download this new version - it's got the sorting order added to it.
-
OK, I'll let you know how it goes.
JP
-
Yessir, that worked. I did it your waaaaay (well, I never said I was any good at singing online...), and this installer is the way it should be. The sorting, however, is not. It finds only one album in my whole library (Enigma - Voyageur), the rest were discarded even though I even tried to create a new field that was absolutely clean and set the ID to that. This goes for all types of sorting.
-
Wahoo - so did you have problems with the old way?
If so it means that Setup Factory 6's ocx file register was just messing up before.
The sort i hadn't had a chance to check - was just tryin to get the installer fixed :)
I'll fix it soon! :)
-
Sort? Did I miss yet another cool feature? What is the deal with sort?
JP
-
Mastiff,
Take a try at http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/MastifAlbumListing.zip (http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/MastifAlbumListing.zip). It works with Scott_r.'s latest "MC XML Export" plugin. I've been having some inconsistency with <thead>s being repeated each page and a little problem with page breaks and I noticed that backgrounds don't seem to show up in HTML Print Preview.
I *hate* HTML.
Please let me know if this is close and I'll try to work out the HTML bugs later today or tomorrow. I haven't taken care of the (Multiple Artists) yet, but that's easy enough.
If there are any HTML gurus out there, I'd sure appreciate some help!
Scott-
-
Nila, yes, the wahoo is justified. Three times tested with the old version, and it did not work. But the new version did. ;D
Scott, no, that's not close. That's very close, dude! The look is exactly the way I like it! A few minor adjustments: I would like the font even a few points smaller (perhaps 1/3 smaller). And the shading didn't show up when printed out on a black and white laser printer (maybe doing it light grey instead of blue will work). With that and the compilations are in, we're were I wanted to get! Even my wife approved it! ;D
You two are really helping me out here! If you don't mind, I will do a page on my site (like I wrote above - sorry that I didn't ask you first) to detail how to automate several zones with unlimited albums in a way that will have people with expensive multi-room cd changer systems begging for mercy! 8)
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Scott, no, that's not close. That's very close, dude! The look is exactly the way I like it! A few minor adjustments: I would like the font even a few points smaller (perhaps 1/3 smaller). And the shading didn't show up when printed out on a black and white laser printer (maybe doing it light grey instead of blue will work). With that and the compilations are in, we're were I wanted to get! Even my wife approved it! ;D
In IE6, you need to tell it to print background colors and images. Go to Tools->Internet Options->Advanced and look for the Printing node. Check "Print background colors and images" and all will be well.
If you want a lighter shade of background, just go to the .xsl and change the .row0 to
.row0 {
background-color:#EEEEEE;
}
Did the page breaks and genre headings work OK for you? For some strange reason, they work for my library's MPL, but not for yours.
Oh... and to speed up the generation of the HTML, make sure that you've only exported the fields that are used. I noticed in the MPL that you sent me you included them all. I also suspect you didn't use MCXMLExport to generate the MPL because calculated fields weren't included.
So... compilations can be determined from the [Artist] field or the [Album Artist (auto)] field?
Scott-
-
With that and the compilations are in, we're were I wanted to get!
How about an MPL that contains some compilations?
Scott-
-
You've got mail! The compilations are defined in [Album Artist (auto)].
The page breaks were between genres, which is very nice. And no, I only exported the MPL (as with this compliation MPL I just sendt you) directly from a playlist in MC.
I guess I'm able to experiment with different text sizes as well. :)
-
You've got mail! The compilations are defined in [Album Artist (auto)].
The page breaks were between genres, which is very nice. And no, I only exported the MPL (as with this compliation MPL I just sendt you) directly from a playlist in MC.
I guess I'm able to experiment with different text sizes as well. :)
Are you using IE6? Do you get a page heading on each page?
The MPL exported using MC's internal mechanisms doesn't include calculated fields. You'll have to use the MCXMLExport plugin in order to get [Album Arist (auto)] in the MPL.
Scott-.
-
Ok,
Seeing as you both had problems could you both do me a big favour and be my testers :)
Browse to the install dir and unregister the file by typing:
regsvr32 -u AlbumIDGenerator.ocx
Then run the uninstall program.
Then run the installer again and see if you get the same problem - hopefully you will.
Uninstall it again then download and run:
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/SetupAPG-new.exe
That's a new installer in which HOPEFULLY everything is working fine.
IF it doesn't give u the same problem again after u unregister and re-install could u also let me know as I really need to try to isolate whats causing the problem.
Either way though - download this new version - it's got the sorting order added to it.
Sorry for the lag, but I did get around to trying this and confirmed that the new installer works like a charm.
JP
-
OK, now for the next challenge. I have downloaded and installed MC XML Export, and also the html generator package. now I just have to understand how to use it. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Thanks,
John
-
Mastiff,
Give this XSLT a try: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/MastiffAlbumListing.xsl (http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/MastiffAlbumListing.xsl)
As soon as I get your MPL, I'll finish the compilation part and this should go good-to-go.
Scott-
-
OK, now for the next challenge. I have downloaded and installed MC XML Export, and also the html generator package. now I just have to understand how to use it. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Thanks,
John
MCXMLExport comes with Preset Configurations. You should be able to try them out by just selecting the right one and hitting "Export". I'm not sure what you mean by "html generator package", but if it's the MastiffAlbumListing.zip, just unzip it into the MCXMLExport directory and you'll find another preset (called, strangely enough, MastiffAlbumListing). You'll need to restart MC or the MCXMLExport plugin to see the new preset if the plugin is running when you unzip. There's a newer XSLT you can try... it's mentioned in a post above this one.
Check out Scott_r.'s Website for MCXMLExport: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~scottray/MC/xmlexport/ (http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~scottray/MC/xmlexport/)
Read my XML Primer if you so desire: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18045 (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18045)
Scott-
-
Wahoooo!!!!
Grrr - Setup Factory 6 sucks!!! :(
After all this time, the only problem ALL my plugins were having then basically is that it wasn't registering the ocx properly.
Well at least I know now and can fix them ALL.
Thanks for the help guys.
I'll get the sort function working too.
-
ok - uploaded a new version - same link as in the last post (with a link).
Sort is fixed in it :)
Enjoy!
-
Nila, you're using VB6, right? Did it come with a Setup and Deployment Wizard? This might do what you need, if you've got it and haven't already tried it. I don't know how good the VB6 one is, but the VB.NET installer wizard is brilliant.
Scott.
-
Nila, sorry, but sort isn't fixed, it seems (at least not when I run it on my test library). This time it runs, but even though I chose Genre,Artist,Album it sorted only by Artist, it seems (maybe by album as well, but at least not by Genre). But the setup works nicely! :)
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VB6 has an installer but I hate it.
Have u ever installed shareware and it comes up with that really nasty VB installer?
That's the vb6 one and it just looks uck and for me at least is a big put off.
I managed to work out a 'work around' for the bug in Setup Factory which seems to do the trick.
Thanks though Scott :)
Mastiff - how are you looking at the results after you do it?
The sort is simply being done with MC's build in sort function.
To get the files I'm doing a search and as part of the search I'm adding in the SORT command.
In fact - the text box that I accidentally left there and forgot to remove should have the full search string being used in MC in it.
Try copying and pasting that search string into the search box in MC and see if it works. :)
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The sort is done correctly when I paste into the search field, but the ID's are generated based on artist name. So Alf Prøyssen, norweigan children's songs, are first, then Alvin Lee (blues) and then Asgeir (more norwgian children's songs). Instead of putting the first ID's on the alphabetically first genre, which is Alternative rock & pop.
-
Mastiff,
Give this XSLT a try: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/MastiffAlbumListing.xsl (http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/MastiffAlbumListing.xsl)
As soon as I get your MPL, I'll finish the compilation part and this should go good-to-go.
Scott-
OK, Mastiff... all done. Please redownload the XSLT from the link quoted above and let me know what you think. If you want to change the font or font-size, take a look at the .xsl and change the CSS at the beginning.
Am I done?
Scott-
-
Sorry, and I wish it was, but either there's something wrong with the way I'm using it or with my setup, or there's still a glitch to iron out. I get the compilation albums represented in all the genres they excist, and mixed with the single artist albums. Do you need a screenshot of my setup, or can you think about something I may have done wrong?
-
Sorry, and I wish it was, but either there's something wrong with the way I'm using it or with my setup, or there's still a glitch to iron out. I get the compilation albums represented in all the genres they excist, and mixed with the single artist albums. Do you need a screenshot of my setup, or can you think about something I may have done wrong?
Send me the "raw XML" and the "transformed" HTML output. If you don't mind, can you quote your config.xml file here? Are you sure that the preset is outputing the needed database fields?
Scott-
-
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16" standalone="yes" ?>
- <MCXMLExportConfiguration Version="1.0">
<CharEncodingIndex>1</CharEncodingIndex>
<SaveRawXMLAs checked="true">MastiffAlbumListing\MastiffAlbumListingMPL.xml</SaveRawXMLAs>
<IncludeXSLProcInstr checked="true">MastiffAlbumListing.xsl</IncludeXSLProcInstr>
<ApplyXSLTransformation checked="true">MastiffAlbumListing\MastiffAlbumListing.xsl</ApplyXSLTransformation>
<SaveTransformedOutputAs>MastiffAlbumListing\MastiffAlbumListing.html</SaveTransformedOutputAs>
<ProcessImagesTo checked="false" />
<ForceAbsoluteNaming checked="false" />
<LaunchOutput checked="true" action="usespecifiedapp" appendoutputfilename="true">iexplore.exe</LaunchOutput>
<TreePathToExport>Media Library\Audio</TreePathToExport>
- <FieldsToExport>
<Field>Album</Field>
<Field>Album Artist (auto)</Field>
<Field>Artist</Field>
<Field>Genre</Field>
</FieldsToExport>
</MCXMLExportConfiguration>
-
A problem & a couple of suggestions:
Hmm... trying out the Album Playlist Generator and got some weird results... without any sorting it warns me that I am about to process 2737 albums, which is surprising, since MC tells me I only have 923 unique album tags (that's audio, 1033 for ML.) If I sort by [artist],[album] or [genre],[artist],[album] from the drop-down menu it tells me I'm about to process 1 album, and if I select [artist] it says 0.
Can it be set to just complete albums? I have 182 'complete' albums... but 923 'unique' album tags... so I'd only want to 'complete' albums. Maybe by allowing the user to work with only a subset of the library, eg I'd add all my complete albums to the playing now and it could just do them?
It doesn't seem to work if the [albumID] field is set to 'integer' (which I had assumed it would be)... a little confusing because it told me it couldn't find the albumID field rather than telling me it was the wrong type.
A version number would come in handy whilst developing, to let me know if I've successfully installled the latest version.
-
They have version numbers but I'm just not too organised with that type of thing :)
Not sure what's up with the strange number of returned results.
I'm going to have to remove the SORT feature.
It was relying on MC to sort the data but MC seems to ignore sort when doing a search inside the SDK so I'm going to take it out for now.
The number of albums is determined purely by MC - It's creating the 'albums' and I'm just processing them so again not something I can fix there.
I'll add an option to only process Complete albums and see if that's enough for you :)
-
That's OK, Nila. No biggie. Thanks for all your work! ;D
-
Hmm... with the sorting... I've noticed a couple of plugins that grab the songs from the 'Playing Now' playlist (KingSparta's)... would it be possible with this one, 'cause I'm thinking that may solve the sorting (and allow one to limit it to a section of the library)... one could add the albums to 'Playing Now' already sorted, and the plugin would grab them one by one from the top?
Anyway, it's just an idea I had. A 'Complete Albums' option would be great :) Thanks for the great plugin :)
They have version numbers but I'm just not too organised with that type of thing
I know what you mean :) I keep forgetting to increment the numbers on my builds... even though I've got an automated script to do it for me somewhere around here :| But then, I haven't really released much I've done yet... so it doesn't matter too much :)
PS: What happens if one removes albums from the library and frees up albumID's? Does it fill those in or keep going from the bottom (I think keep going from the bottom would be the best option)
-
Another Preset Configuration has been added for MCXMLExport... MastiffAlbumListing. Named after, you guess who.
Check it out here: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/Presets.htm (http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/Presets.htm)
Scott-
-
Hi,
I have been playing with the MC XML Exporter and I'm having a bit of trouble, hoping someone can help. When I run the export with the "Mastiff" presets, It takes a really long time to complete, >2hours. When it finally does complete, none of the AlbumIDs are populated. There is just a symbol that resembles a stretched 0 for every album.
What am I doing wrong? You guys have really done some coll stuff here, this is going to be great!
Thanks,
-
Hi,
I have been playing with the MC XML Exporter and I'm having a bit of trouble, hoping someone can help. When I run the export with the "Mastiff" presets, It takes a really long time to complete, >2hours. When it finally does complete, none of the AlbumIDs are populated. There is just a symbol that resembles a stretched 0 for every album.
What am I doing wrong? You guys have really done some coll stuff here, this is going to be great!
Thanks,
John,
I'm a bum for not changing this sooner - Mastiff had pointed it out to me, but I forgot to do it. I'll try and fix it tomorrow. The problem is that not everyone will use the same field name for the AlbumID. In fact, Mastiff used ID - which is why you're not seeing an AlbumID information. If you go into the .xsl, you shoud see where to make the change yourself:
<td width="50%">
<p class="hangindent">
<xsl:text>(</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="Field[@Name='ID']"/>
<xsl:text>)</xsl:text>
</p>
</td>
Replace 'ID' with whatever you named the field (i.e. 'AlbumID').
I will change the XSLT to use a variable - so it will be easy to see at the top of the .xsl where to change the value.
If it's taking a really long time, are you sure you're only exporting the desired fields to the MPL? If you make some concessions (like, say, only look at Track #1 for the album information), things speed up to the blink of an eye. This is what I did for Mastiff, because his library is on the order of "huge".
If you don't mind, would you email an MPL of all your audio with all your fields in it? Zip it up and it will be plently reasonable in size. My address is scottraymond@sbcglobal.net. Then I can work on optimizing the XSLT.
Scott-
-
Bum? I don't think so. You are making my life a lot easier and the least I can do is go through a little trial and error. Please excuse my ignorance, but how do I complie an mpl to send you? I am really not sure where the mpl fits into this puzzle.
Thanks for your patience with me.
John
-
Bum? I don't think so. You are making my life a lot easier and the least I can do is go through a little trial and error. Please excuse my ignorance, but how do I complie an mpl to send you? I am really nt sure where the mpl fits into this puzzle.
Thanks for your patience with me.
John
An MPL is the "Save raw XML as" option in the MCXMLExport plugin. This is an XML format that JRiver has specified for describing media items. Just go into the MCXMLExport plugin, select your Media Library/Audio, all fields, check the "Save raw XML as" and set to whatever. Just zip the result, and Bob's your uncle.
I just noticed that I neglected to check "Track #" in the preset config.xml file I packaged in the zip. So... that pretty much tells me you probably selected all the fields when running the export ('cause if you didn't have Track # selected, the output would be blank). That will make the transformation take *A LONG TIME* to run. So... check only the fields:
<Field>Album</Field>
<Field>Album Artist (auto)</Field>
<Field>Artist</Field>
<Field>Genre</Field>
<Field>Track #</Field>
And if you want to get slick, instead of using your Media Library as the source of items, create a playlist that just has audio and [Track #]=1. Then the transformation will happen in the bliink of an eye.
Scott-
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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 (8) 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. 8)
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
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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! ;D) 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! :o
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.
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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 :)
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"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.
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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 :)
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You need to read all of my long, boring messages, Nila! ;D
From the message above:
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. ;D
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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...). ;)
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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.
:)
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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?
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Any word on a version of Album ID that has an option for only complete albums yet? :)
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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.
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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 :)
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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. ;)
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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
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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 :)
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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 :)
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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 :)
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Nila, you're late! ;D 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. 8)
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Cool... sounds great, downloading now to try it out... looking forward to the sorting :)
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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.
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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)--
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
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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. ;)
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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?
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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*)
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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.
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I just looked at my lib and no files have the band tag set. Must be coming from someplace else???
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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!
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looking forward to playing with the next plugin :)
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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 :)
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Nila, can the standalone program be zone specific later on?
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Ok,
New version with the play control program.
Execute it to see how it's called.
Feedback welcomed as always, hope it works well!!
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/SetupAPG.exe
I'll add zone control after, what it'll do is just call it to change the zone, wait X second then apply the rest of the commands.
U can set the value of X yourselves to tweak it to your systems.
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Thanks, Nila. I'll try to look at it this weekend. This week has been crazy for me. One thing, though: The "wait x seconds" method is very unreliable. Isn't it possible to wait for a specific heading (window title), and to make those user configurable? In my case that would be for instance change zone to zone 3 and wait for "Media Center (Kevin)".
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I spoke to Rhino about this and he said it takes some low level programming to find out this kind of info.
Girder has a feature to check this so you could simply just set it up as a girder action set, first it changes the zone, waits for it to change then calls this to set what playlist to play?
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That's the way I do it now, but then we're really back to square one since Girder can also call the playlists. In that case the easiest way is to stick with my multigroup.
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Hmm,
lol.
It sounds like a LOT of learning on my part how to pull the info out and when we can already get it working it just seems like my time could be better spent on other projects (website creator).
Girder sounds like it'll do the job pretty well and it's VERY powerful.
If I get more free time later maybe I'll look at it.
If there's something you cant do thou with girder then just let me know and I'll try come up with a fix for it ;)
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Thanks, I would agree that this is not essential. Girder really does all that pretty well, the only thing missing is the ability to send a playlist directly to an MC zone without changing to that zone. And that is impossible for as long as that function isn't put in by JRiver themselves. Like I believe I said, I'm very satisfied with the playlist creator you made, and I have got the simple system I wanted. ;D
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Cool,
so does the sort and everything else work properly in it now?
If so I'd say it's a done deal and I'll just archieve the code and not worry about it any more.
Also, you seem to be pretty good on girder.
How can I set it up so that when I press volume up it increases the volume by 5 and ALSO displays the current value for the volume? I cant seem to work out how to do this.
Also, holding down my buttons on it doesn't seem to work, it just acts like a single click and I have to repeatedly press it? :(
Any help appreciated.
Thanks!!
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Do you have serial cntrol of the device you are trying to change volume on, or are you just doing the windows/MC volume?
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Just windows volume control.
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Wahoo!!!
SDK has Zone support or so it says here:
http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/DevZone/MJAutomation.html#CMJZonesAutomation
So, I can add it to my program, no need for Girder.
What versions of MC are you guys using? If it's ten then this should work for you guys! ;)
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Sorry, I haven't taken the chance to go beyond 9.1 yet, and it will take some time as well. Any chances of a crash is unacceptable to me, I'm afraid. It's the wife acceptancy factor...
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ah ok fair enough.
I asked what build the Zone support was added in so I could tell if it was added in v9.1 (they only just updated the documentation but did not say what builds the changes had taken effect in) but got no reply.
As such I have no idea when they added this.
Sorry ;)
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Nila has asked me to say if you require support for this plugin please contact him at mcpluginsupport @britcrew.com as he is no longer available here.
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There is a lot of mention in ths thread about an AlbumIndex plugin. I'm interested in using a plugin like this to make it simpler to use Supernudelist. I have over 700 albums, so the thought of doing this manually doesn't thrill me.
My question is where is the plugin? I looked around, but I didn't see any place to download it. Is it available for download?
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Once I figured out how to create the AlbumID field, (OK, so I'm sort of a MC newbie) I had no problem generating the Albums ID's and playlists.
This is what I HATE about searching for problems on the internet. If you were having problems figuring it out, someone else is as well. Post what you did. I can't find this information anywhere.
Don't mean to be rude, bad day of searching newsgroups for problem fixes. Many people post that they're having a problem, but never post the resolution.
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Well I found it.
Under: Tools > options > Tree & View
Click add and enter in the field name and type.
Though now I can have it create playlists named by the albumID (1,2,3, etc). When I change the field to Album, I get about 10 playlists created before it errors out with
Error: 76 - Path Not Found.
Am I the only one having this problem? Anyone know the solution?
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Could you add a relative path option? My reason for using this plug-in is so that I can put the playlists on my mp3 player (which does not support sorting albums by track #, so I'd have to use a playlist). Obviously the paths are different on the mp3 player than my PC.