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Author Topic: Tracklists  (Read 1979 times)

aksdb

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Tracklists
« on: April 28, 2010, 04:03:33 pm »

I'm using MediaCenter since version 10 and am pretty happy with it (apart from missing Linux support :D). I have one thing however that I can't find a good solution for.
I have a huge collection of radio rips (expanded by at least 4 hours in 2 tracks every week). For these files I have tracklists (usually consisting of ~20 titles) in the form of text files. Currently I have these text files just sitting there with the according mp3 files (somerip.mp3 and somerip.txt). Now if I'm looking for a specific track in my collection, I first search in MC if I have the file standalone and afterwards I use a file content search through all *.txt in my music directory. I would like to integrate that into MC too.
Sure, the best solution would be to take the time and create cue files that I could import - I even did that for some rips, but it takes a lot of time I don't really want to spend ... and automatically creating them with bogus time values doesn't seem right either (although it's currently the closest thing to a solution I have).

Has someone a better idea how I could manage this? Preferably with separation of the contained info (typical tracklist format is [track#]. [artist] - [title]).
If there is no way to do that currently, then consider it a feature wish :-)
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aksdb

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Re: Tracklists
« Reply #1 on: May 01, 2010, 04:10:54 pm »

Am I really the only one with that particular use-case?
*bump*
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JimH

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Re: Tracklists
« Reply #2 on: May 01, 2010, 04:18:00 pm »

You might try using the Notes feature.  You have to turn it on in Tools/Options/General/Advanced/Features.  It will then show up in the tree under Audio, Video, Images.

Enter a note as pain text.  The first line will become the subject.  Notes are searchable in the same way that tracks can be found with a search.
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rick.ca

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Re: Tracklists
« Reply #3 on: May 01, 2010, 07:35:03 pm »

Has someone a better idea how I could manage this? Preferably with separation of the contained info (typical tracklist format is [track#]. [artist] - [title]).

You might consider this more trouble than it's worth, but it does what your asking for. As long as the track list files are in reasonably consistent format...

1. Copy all of them to one directory and append them into one file, writing the pathname (i.e., "[path]\somerip.mp3") to identify each session.

2. Import this into Excel and parse it into file pathname, session, track #, artist, track name.

3. In Excel, construct a batch command for each track—something like: echo MC15.EXE [pathname] > \[session]\[track #]. [artist] - [track name].bat.

4. Copy the batch command column of the worksheet to a text editor, and save it as a BAT file. Run it in the root directory where you want to create the files. The idea is to create a batch file for every track that plays it's somerip.mp3, and which has a filename containing all the track list information.

5. Import these batch files to MC. They will import as Data, so change Media Type to Audio.

6. Use Fill properties from filename to tag the files—as illustrated in the screen shot.

If your tracklists include duration, you should process that as well and save it in a custom field. Those might help you estimate where a track starts within it's file. If there are no breaks between the tracks, you could even compute the start position in Excel and put that in a custom field. Now if only there were a MC Core Command for playing a playback range... :-\
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aksdb

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Re: Tracklists
« Reply #4 on: May 02, 2010, 10:54:55 am »

Those are both pretty good ideas. Special thanks to rick.ca for that very thorough guide on using MC with batch files ... I never considered that before :)
For now I think I'll stick to JimH's idea, although I made a custom library field "Tracklist". Before the mentioning of "Notes" I didn't know that it was possible to have multiline library fields at all. The search seems to yield the results I want, although I still have to lookup the exact track position in the mouseover of the new "Tracklist" field - but it's far better than what I had before.
Now I only need to write some script to import all my tracklists into these fields :D But that's something for another "boring" afternoon ;-)

Thanks again - to both of you!

And btw.: It is always impressive, how flexible MC is ... :-)
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Alex B

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Re: Tracklists
« Reply #5 on: May 02, 2010, 11:07:58 am »

Quote
... I didn't know that it was possible to have multiline library fields at all. ...

You could try the Lyrics field. Some Track Info visualizations can show lyrics in the main display during playback.
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