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More => Old Versions => Media Center 13 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: Big G on April 22, 2009, 03:51:57 pm

Title: How to Paste Excel Data into MC13?
Post by: Big G on April 22, 2009, 03:51:57 pm
Maybe I'm missing something, but is there any way to do this?

Suppose I have a column of data in Excel with, say, 200 different entries. I want this information to go into the Comments field of 200 different songs in MC 13. I can do it by copying and pasting one cell at a time, but I'd much rather do it in one shot. Is this possible?

Thanks!
Title: Re: How to Paste Excel Data into MC13?
Post by: Matt on April 22, 2009, 04:08:40 pm
You can copy from Media Center to Excel, but not currently the other way around.

It might be a nice thing to add, although it would probably require a wizard that allowed field mapping, header skipping, etc. to work nicely.
Title: Re: How to Paste Excel Data into MC13?
Post by: hit_ny on April 23, 2009, 03:26:07 am
what was that ?

Think there will not be any opposition to this idea  ;D
Title: Re: How to Paste Excel Data into MC13?
Post by: bunglemebaby on April 23, 2009, 04:51:34 pm
Quote
It might be a nice thing to add, although it would probably require a wizard that allowed field mapping, header skipping, etc. to work nicely.

Heck yeah, it'd be nice. This could allow for some really powerful importing of data created by tools that don't write tags or for file types that don't support tags. There are probably tons of other uses too...
Title: Re: How to Paste Excel Data into MC13?
Post by: rick.ca on April 23, 2009, 11:15:52 pm
Maybe I'm missing something, but is there any way to do this?

It's awkward, but it can be done by importing the information as a playlist. Imagine your data consists of two columns in Excel: [filename] and [comment]. ([filename] is the full pathname—essential for matching the target media record.) To import this as a playlist, get it into an "MPL" (XML) format that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<MPL Version="2.0" Title="My Import">
<Item>
<Field Name="Filename">[filename]</Field>
<Field Name="Comment">[comment]</Field>
</Item>
</MPL>

In Excel, change [filename] to <Field Name="Filename">[filename]</Field> and [comment] to <Field Name="Comment">[comment]</Field>, then save the file as XML. Open this XML file in a text editor, and delete all but the parts that look like this:

<Row>
<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">&lt;Field Name=&quot;Filename&quot;&gt;[filename]&lt;/Field&gt;</Data></Cell>
<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">&lt;Field Name=&quot;Comment&quot;&gt;[comment]&lt;/Field&gt;</Data></Cell>
</Row>

Use the search and replace function of your text editor to change <Row> tags to <Item> tags, delete the red parts and change the green parts back into the ", < and > they were. The result will be in correct format for the <Item> section of the MPL file. Import the resulting MPL file, and you're done.

Yes, an Excel import tool would be nice—although it would take all the fun out of this. ;)
Title: Re: How to Paste Excel Data into MC13?
Post by: enigman on April 24, 2009, 11:02:17 am
If you're just tagging MP3 files, you can use a combination of a command line tool and excel to create a batch file which will tag everything:


1. Get this: http://home.wanadoo.nl/squell/id3.html

2. Create a column in excel which is a formula designed to mimic the command line output
e.g. "id3 -c " & commentsCell & " " & filenameCell

3. Drag the formula across all the rows.

4. Copy the column into a text file and name it tagger.bat

5. Run the batch file to update the ID3 tags

6. Tell MC to update info from tags

Et voilà!

Hope this helps!