Putting aside why and what for, what I do is this:
#1] Create a new FOLDER
#2] Copy some audio files to it- in various formats. So I have something like:
File A.mp3
Performance B.mp3
Song C.flac
Track D.wv
#3] Arrange them mostly alphabetically, rarely with sight variations- thus change their FILENAMEs according to my needs. So I might have something like:
F Track D.wv
File A.mp3
Performance B.mp3
Song C.flac
#4] Multiply most of the files- some time to as little as 2-3 instances, sometimes to as much as 15-25. In order to do that I simply press CTRL + C and the press and hold CTRL + V
#5] Load everything to Mp3tag and execute an action on it, that replaces all those - Copy (2)
with something like DUPLICATE-01
, - Copy (3)
with DUPLICATE-02
etc.- so that all files in such Folder will look more readable. The result might be like this:
F Track D.wv
F Track D DUPLICATE-01.wv
F Track D DUPLICATE-01.wv
F Track D DUPLICATE-02.wv
F Track D DUPLICATE-03.wv
F Track D DUPLICATE-04.wv
File A.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-01.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-02.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-03.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-04.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-05.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-06.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-07.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-08.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-09.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-10.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-11.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-12.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-13.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-14.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-15.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-16.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-17.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-18.mp3
File A DUPLICATE-19.mp3
Performance B.mp3
Song C.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-01.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-02.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-03.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-04.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-05.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-06.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-07.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-08.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-09.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-10.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-11.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-12.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-13.flac
Song C DUPLICATE-14.flac
All of that has worked fine for me for some time. But now I find myself having in such folders 500, 800 or even over 1000 files. And most of them are those DUPLICATEs, often with very long original FILENAMEs. And so It is simply hard to navigate through them in both a file manager and in Mp3tag- all I do is scroll, scroll and scroll through them. And on top of that there is the problem of shrinking hard disk space, as all those FOLDERs I must keep for archive reason and reference in the feature. And also sometimes I need to load all of the past FOLDERs to Mp3tag, which takes my hardware more and more time with every month to perform
And so I came up with this idea. Instead of creating DUPLICATEs, I will make an M3U8 playlist. So in this example it comes down to having in the FOLDER files:
F Track D.m3u8
F Track D.wv
File A.m3u8
File A.mp3
Performance B.mp3
Song C.flac
Song C.m3u8
and with these 3 playlist looking like this
#EXTM3U
F Track D.wv
F Track D.wv
F Track D.wv
F Track D.wv
#EXTM3U
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
File A.mp3
#EXTM3U
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
Song C.flac
[The Performance B.mp3
was not DUPLICATEd as not everything needs to be repeated / looped]
I need such playlist [not evoking paths], so that the FOLDERs can be moved around hard drives, as I need those playlist [i.e. loops] to work also in the future, wherever the whole FOLDERs [not merely playlist files] might end up
So what is my problem? The time
I can perform swiftly the first 3 steps described in the beginning. But then I have to:
A] manually create a playlist for a given file
B] open that file with Notepad or whatever
C] remove from it the path to the file
D] manually copy the name of the file within the playlist file as many times as I need, counting the copies / lines
But the only convenience I was able to incorporate into hat process was the usage of software that displays the numbers of lines [so that I can see how many "DUPLICATEs" I have already inserted into the playlist]
So multiply that by dozens of Tracks / Files / Performances / Songs and you will get a picture how tedious and erroneous the whole shebang becomes. And then comes another one job like that and another one
So is there an easy way to generate such playlists? So that I could have only once instance of every file in the FOLDER and then execute something, which would add to them a ready to use playlist? I could settle for something that would create 50 entries in the playlist and then manually remove the excess from every one- but the ideal solution would be an ability to generate a playlist file with the exact number of loops that I want, thus without a need to adjust it later on
I also fought of being able to link such M3U8 files to some one big folder that would host the actual files, using later on only the playlists- but that would start to fall apart with any changes to the FILENAMEs [and within FOLDERs I do not change the FILENAMEs]
And I would need to be able to load all those playlists to Mp3tag- as I need to see the data from the tag fields. And I know that by loading up Song C.flac
and Song C.m3u8
I will see only one instance of Song C
in Mp3tag and 15 in Winamp- but that is exactly what I need to see