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More => Old Versions => Media Center 13 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: thorathome on January 21, 2009, 07:57:23 pm

Title: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: thorathome on January 21, 2009, 07:57:23 pm

Nice work on MC13!  Just upgraded delightfully simply and painlessly.  Thank you.

I am using M3U Playlists for moving between machines (and to a fruit-branded music player). 

Filenames with commas are exported by JRMC13 but are skipped on import. 
Examples (2): 
S:\MP3\Collections\Verve Remixed 2\Oscar Brown, Jr. - Brother Where Are You_ (Slinky, Cool) [Matthew Herbert Remix] - Verve Remixed, Vol. 2.mp3
S:\MP3\Collections\Pure Moods - Celestial Celebration\Norah Jones - More Than This (Roxy Cover, Feat. Charlie Hunter)).mp3

I have a number of saved Playlists where some small number (hard to detect) of tracks are skipped on import. 

How do I work around this, please? 
Thanks. 

Been happily using MC12 for years now, originally as an upgrade from MusicMatch, and like the product well enough to upgrade to MC13. 
Keep up the good work. 

Thor

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: JimH on January 22, 2009, 06:51:45 am

Thanks for the kind words.  We'll check the problem you've reported.

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: Matt on January 22, 2009, 12:06:34 pm

Hi Thor.

I don't seem to be able to reproduce this issue.

I made an M3U inside Media Center that looked like:
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 01 - King of New Orleans.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 02 - R3wind.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 03 - Long Lost.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 04 - Normal Town.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 05 - Scared Are You_.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 06 - Return of the Post Moderns.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 07 - Hung the Moon.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 08 - Desperately Wanting.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 09 - Still Life with Cooley.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 10 - Wwoz.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 11 - Happy Endings.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 12 - Speeding Up to Slow Down.ape
M:\Music\New\Better Than Ezra\Friction, Baby\Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby - 13 - At Ch. Degaulle, Etc.ape


Then I cleared my library, and dropped the M3U into Playing Now.  It got all the files and started playing.

Any other tips?

Thanks.

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: Matt on January 22, 2009, 12:22:06 pm

I also tried this filename so I was doing a better test:
M:\MP3\Collections\Verve Remixed 2\Oscar Brown, Jr. - Brother Where Are You_ (Slinky, Cool) [Matthew Herbert Remix] - Verve Remixed, Vol. 2.mp3

It worked too.

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: Alex B on January 22, 2009, 12:32:21 pm

Thor,

Quote

S:\

Is this a NAS drive with a built-in operating system?
Can you reproduce the problem if you copy some of those files to a similar folder structure on your C: drive and create a playlist of them?

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: thorathome on January 22, 2009, 09:01:57 pm

Thanks.  Will check on moving all to C:. 
My S: drive is a USB portable drive. 
Thanks for your responsiveness. 

My MC13 crashed hard.  I am reinstalling now. 
Best,
Thor

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: thorathome on January 23, 2009, 01:53:20 pm

OK.  Here are three filenames that fail on import. 
C:\MP3\Suba\Tributo\B., Kátia - Bid - Suba - Are You Sleeping-.mp3
C:\MP3\Collections\Pure Moods - Celestial Celebration\Norah Jones - More Than This (Roxy Cover, Feat. Charlie Hunter).mp3
C:\MP3\Collections\Hotel Costes, Vol. 4 - Quatre\10 - Sous Le Soleil [Cuba Acoustic Mix] (Real Good, Moves) - Amelia, The Major Boys.mp3

I found two conditions that interact: 

1) If the drive = C: I can import these filenames with commas, accents, etc.  The D: drive doesn't work, even though it's simply a partition of my internal hard drive.  S: doesn't work either.  It's a USB external drive. 

2) I can only import these oddball entries this if I delete the playlist beforehand.  If I do not delete the playlist beforhand, I cannot import files like I have listed, above.  Those titles are simply ignored by the playlist import function.  Normally, I can successfully import over an existing playlist.  It's just this odd filename condition I've run into. 

As you can tell, I put a little time into this.  Any light you can shed on this issue would be valued.  I have a bunch of international titles in my music collection and I use playlist import and export frequently. 

Thanks in advance.

Thor

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: Matt on January 23, 2009, 01:59:43 pm

Does MPL work any better than M3U?

MPL is UTF-8, so it will support Unicode characters.  M3U is ANSI, so it has limited international character support.

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: thorathome on January 23, 2009, 04:13:12 pm

Will check it out. 
Thor

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: thorathome on January 24, 2009, 03:20:20 pm

Matt and Alex B. 

Thanks.  The MPL workes fine for me. 
I will now manually cleanup my 20 or so playlists, them export them to MPL format.  Too bad, because the M3U files are all fine. 

I am still wondering, however, why the M3U Playlist Import fails - and if it could possibly be fixed. 
The same filename text strings that fail with M3U Playlist Import succeed when I paste one directly into an Explorer address bar - the song plays on MC13 perfectly.  The very same filename text string will then fail in a M3U Playlist Import.  The error has to do with non-C: drive filenames containing commas or international characters - a big deal, I imagine, with any large music collections. 

Thanks for all.  Any resolution of this beyond the MPL workaround would be most appreciated. 

Play on. 
Thor

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: Matt on January 24, 2009, 04:55:32 pm

International characters (code greater than 255) can't work with an ANSI M3U.  We could write the M3U in UTF-8 or UTF-16 but then a lot of other software probably wouldn't load the M3U.

However, punctuation should work fine in an M3U.  It's a riddle to me why it wouldn't.  All I can think is that Media Center can't find / read the file pointed to by the playlist for permission reasons.

Title: Re: Import and Export Playlists with commas and other punctuation
Post by: thorathome on January 24, 2009, 05:27:34 pm

OK, ready for this? 
I just upgraded to MC 130.0.112.  Problem fixed. 

It appears to have been a Playlist M3U export problem with 130.0.108. 
Old M3U Playlist files from 130.0.108 (and prior) don't import correctly. 
New ones created with 130.0.112 import fine.  The only bad news - these new M3U files now import correctly into iTunes, too!

Hey, thanks for the great support.  I remain a fan and am pleased I just paid for the MC13 upgrade.  Worth it for this level of support and product quality. 

Case closed. 

Thor