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Author Topic: Can somebody please make a playlist creator?  (Read 31074 times)

Mastiff

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Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« on: December 25, 2003, 06:59:00 pm »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2003, 08:01:38 pm »

Doesn't sound too hard but I'm not following what u want exactly :)
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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #2 on: December 28, 2003, 02:35:38 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #3 on: December 28, 2003, 05:56:41 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #4 on: December 28, 2003, 06:29:32 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #5 on: December 28, 2003, 06:38:27 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #6 on: December 28, 2003, 06:51:19 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #7 on: December 28, 2003, 07:20:19 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #8 on: December 28, 2003, 07:32:37 am »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #9 on: December 28, 2003, 01:18:08 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #10 on: December 29, 2003, 10:57:35 am »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #11 on: December 29, 2003, 12:00:53 pm »

Quote
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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #12 on: December 29, 2003, 12:24:14 pm »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #13 on: December 29, 2003, 12:42:39 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #14 on: December 29, 2003, 01:43:15 pm »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #15 on: December 29, 2003, 03:06:32 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #16 on: December 29, 2003, 03:19:07 pm »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #17 on: December 29, 2003, 06:26:48 pm »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #18 on: December 29, 2003, 06:50:08 pm »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #19 on: December 29, 2003, 07:25:05 pm »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #20 on: December 29, 2003, 08:46:02 pm »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #21 on: December 29, 2003, 09:18:13 pm »

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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BadDog

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #22 on: December 29, 2003, 09:36:21 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #23 on: December 30, 2003, 01:40:22 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #24 on: December 30, 2003, 05:54:44 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #25 on: December 30, 2003, 06:04:36 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #26 on: December 30, 2003, 07:04:52 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #27 on: December 30, 2003, 07:32:42 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #28 on: December 30, 2003, 08:37:29 am »

You want them as Media Jukebox playlists or as physical playlists on your computer?
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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #29 on: December 30, 2003, 08:48:49 am »

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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BadDog

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #30 on: December 30, 2003, 09:19:21 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #31 on: December 30, 2003, 09:39:21 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #32 on: December 31, 2003, 01:29:02 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #33 on: December 31, 2003, 09:10:17 am »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #34 on: December 31, 2003, 10:02:34 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #35 on: December 31, 2003, 10:28:29 am »

Same here.  ? :'(
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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #36 on: December 31, 2003, 11:53:32 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #37 on: December 31, 2003, 12:41:00 pm »

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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Marko

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #38 on: December 31, 2003, 12:54:35 pm »

I did a regserv32 on the ocx which got things going....


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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #39 on: December 31, 2003, 01:24:11 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #40 on: December 31, 2003, 07:00:05 pm »

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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Zarius

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #41 on: December 31, 2003, 07:33:24 pm »

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' 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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #42 on: December 31, 2003, 11:15:58 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #43 on: January 01, 2004, 05:46:44 am »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #44 on: January 01, 2004, 09:57:49 am »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #45 on: January 01, 2004, 10:36:48 am »

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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sraymond

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #46 on: January 01, 2004, 11:45:10 am »

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 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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #47 on: January 01, 2004, 12:22:00 pm »

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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Mastiff

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #48 on: January 01, 2004, 02:55:43 pm »

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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nila

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Re:Can somebody please make a playlist creator?
« Reply #49 on: January 01, 2004, 05:43:39 pm »

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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