Making playlists

Support
#1

Hi, I want to do the following:

When tagging an album I want to make a playlist containing all of the songs in the album. After I've done so I manually move the mp3 files to my 'finished mp3 folder'. This folder gets autoscanned by MediaMonkey which will move the files to a subdirectory (based on the artist name) of said folder.

Now after that I want to move the playlist that I made to the finished folder as well so MediaMonkey can read it and automatically add the playlist to my library. However, i've tried everything in MP3Tag but none of the playlists it creates can be read by MediaMonkey.

Can anyone help me?

#2

Playlists basicly contains links to files.
If MediaMonkey changes the filennames or stores the files in more than one folder, the playlist files can't be found anymore by any media player.

To solve that, you can:
Create the playlist after MediaMonkey has moved the files and/or changed the names.

Or:

Move the files with Mp3Tag. (That's what I would recommend.) To do so you can use:

  • the Tag - Filename Converter
    Format String: C:\Users\Faalscholver\Music\%artist%\%year% - %album%$num(%track%,2) - %title%
    or
  • Action: Format Value
    Field: _DIRECTORY
    Format String: C:\Users\Faalscholver\Music\%artist%\%year% - %album%

(format string are of course only examples, you can use whatever you like)
the first method moves audio files only. the second one moves the whole directory including other files in it like cover artwork or playlists

#3

Thanks!

However, making the playlists after MM does the moving seems counteractive since it would mean I'd have to break down the tagging session in MP3Tag into two parts which is a waste of time. It's what i'm currently doing though.

Moving the files from within MP3tag is also a problem. The first method doesn't move the playlist and the second method moves the entire directory which is not what I want.

Basically what i'm looking for is for MP3Tag to make a playlist that I can create before moving and is usable after moving.

Now, the files do end all up the same way (M:\Music\Artist\artist - track.mp3) However when I make a playlist in MP3Tag it seems to always include the path of the original directory which makes it useless after files are moved to their final home.

#4

that's why i recommend to let Mp3Tag do the whole job.

That's right. But when you do it all in Mp3Tag it's no problem to create the playlist after moving the files.

That should be possible anyway if you create the playlist in the same directory as the files are stored. In m3u playlists only relative file paths are stored. That means when all files are in the same directory only:
filename1.mp3
filename2.mp3
...

and when there are more than one folders something like this:
cd1\filename1.mp3
cd1\filename2.mp3
...
cd2\filename1.mp3
cd2\filename2.mp3
...

If this path relation is still the same and the filenames didn't have been changed after moving, the playlist can still be used.
You can open the playlist with a text editor to see what is written inside.

So just use the Tag - Filename Converster with
M:\Music\%artist%\%artist% - %title%
and create the playlist after that. (I guess you mean artist - title.mp3 for your filennames, track is the tracknumber).

#5

I'm trying your last solution but I get a [SYNTAX ERROR IN FORMATTING STRING]

The reason for this probably because there's is a ' in the path. Why should that give an error?

#6

I don't see a ' in:
M:\Music\%artist%\%artist% - %title%

Anyway, if this was just a expample, and your real path is something like
M:\Mu'sic\%artist%\%artist% - %title%
you have to use '' instead of '
M:\Mu''sic\%artist%\%artist% - %title%
that's because ' has special functions inside the formating string, for more information see here: http://help.mp3tag.de/main_scripting.html

#7

That doesn't work.

It will just create a new directory called Music instead of putting the files into Mu'sic.

#8

Nevermind, it was 2x ' instead of "

:laughing:

#9

I don't understand, but I think it works now, right?

#10

See your link for that. You need to replace the single apostrophe with two apostrophes instead of quotation marks. It looks the same but it isn't.

Anyway, yeah it does work. However in case I want to overwrite already existing files it doesn't. :frowning:

#11

Also, it doesn't work for playlists either. :frowning:

When i open the .m3u file in an editor the ' is simply gone which makes the path invalid.

#12

Where in the path do you have the ' ?
It works at my side with:
cd'1\filename.mp3

Overwriting is not possible, that's right.

#13

Here's the string I use for the playlist:

M:\Heerschende Data\MP3''s\%artist%\%artist% - %album%.m3u

It gets added to the correct directory but then when I open a playlist it looks like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:43,Morphine - Dawna
....\MP3s\Morphine\Morphine - Dawna.mp3
#EXTINF:200,Morphine - Buena
....\MP3s\Morphine\Morphine - Buena.mp3
#EXTINF:204,Morphine - I'm Free Now
....\MP3s\Morphine\Morphine - I'm Free Now.mp3
#EXTINF:221,Morphine - All Wrong
....\MP3s\Morphine\Morphine - All Wrong.mp3

(etc...)

#14

Any reason for that?

#15

I can't reproduce that.
Naming the playlist
M:\Heerschende Data\MP3''s\%artist%\%artist% - %album%.m3u
seems not to work at all. %artist% & %album% are not recognized as placeholders, and MP3''s is not necessary here, only MP3's. Seems that there is no scripting allowed in nameing m3u file. Or maybe I make something wrong this time.

Filenames like
....\MP3s\Morphine\Morphine - Dawna.mp3
are also strange in playlist. ....\ means that the mp3 is stored in the parent directory of the parent directory form the place where the playlist is stored. Isn't that a strang place to store the playlist?
Anyway, I could reproduce that and it worked, also with ....\MP3's.

I guess overwriting is disabled to avoid accidentally deleting files with wrong filename string. e.g. if you would accidentally name all files of a album %artist% - %album% instead of %aritst% - %title%, all files but one would be overwritten because the placeholders are the same.

#16

I'm not sure what that means? isn't %artist% - %album%.m3u the most logical name for a playlist?

I'm even less sure what you mean by this? (Sorry)

I don't really mind where the playlist is stored because once the playlist is read by MM I delete it from the folder since it becomes useless at that point.

I see, I wish there was an option to confirm overwrite anyway. A large part of my tagging work is done to upgrade a library that was initially build with less than optimally ripped mp3's. However if I remove the old mp3's and then add the new mp3's I will lose associated info in MM (Like playtimes, date added, ratings, etc.)

#17

Ah, I see. Under Options > Playlist I had "00 - playlist.m3u" and tryed to changed the name in the confirm filename dialog. That does not work with placeholders. But under Options this works.

#18

That is pretty weird. I have it set under options too and it doesn't work here like it does with you.

I'm not sure what you mean. But let's visualize it.

The original mp3 files are in:

M:\New Rips\Morphine - Cure For Pain\

  1. I tag those files with MP3Tag.

  2. The files are moved to M:\Heerschende Data\MP3's\Morphine\

  3. Finally I want to make a playlist. Personally I don't mind where the playlist goes. So If I want to store the playlist in M:\Heerschende Data\MP3's\Morphine\ what string do I use?

Undoubtedly, but sometimes the tags don't contain enough information for MM to make an accurate playlist. For instance if some of the songs that I want on the playlist do not have the same album tag.

Exactly, and I don't want to clutter up my MP3 Directory with all kinds of directories from rips and downloads.

Sure but then I could just as well manually overwrite those files, using windows explorer and I don't have to close MM for that.

In fact if MM is closed while overwriting, I'd have to rescan the overwritten files manually to reflect any tag changes after launching MM again.

#19

So why don't you move the whole directory whith Format Value: _DIRECTORY with the string: M:\Heerschende Data\MP3''s\Morphine\ ??? It's the simplest thing, and the playlist is moved also.

M:\Heerschende Data\MP3''s\%artist%\%artist% - %album%.m3u
But there should not be any leading ....\ in front of the filepaths inside the playlist if you store it in the same folder as the audio files.

I still don't understand, before you wrote, you have moved the playlist already in this path successfully. And now I see your files are moved to the same folder. So maybe the problem was the playlist itself. Because when a playlist contains
....\MP3's\Morphine\Morphine - Dawna.mp3
as you wrote before (i have added the '), that means that audio files and playlist are stored like the following relation:
parent folder2\parent folder1\folder\Morphine - Cure For Pain.m3u
parent folder2\MP3's\Morphine\Morphine - Dawna.mp3

So why don't you just give them the same album tag??? Or maybe you need the BAND Tag for compilations to mark them as a album.
Or are you talking about personal playlists of songs from different albums?

#20

Because moving a directory means that I will have a directory in my mp3 folder that I do not want to be there. All directories in my mp3 folder are based on %artist%, moving such directory would create a directory named %artist% - %album% Which means I know cannot find something manually anymore because my naming scheme system is compromised. And with about 12.000 different artists that is not a good thing.

Besides that function also moves any artifacts that may be found in the original directory like .jpg, .cue, .txt, etc.

Finally, I would then still have to go in manually to also relocate any files that I want to overwrite other files.

I just simply want to create a playlist with mp3Tag that says:

M:\heerschende data\mp3's\Artist\artist - title.mp3

For each song in the playlist. But it doesn't work :frowning: :frowning: :frowning:

For instance, if I have a song that appears on two albums and is identical I do not want to have a double entry in my library. I want it tagged for one of the albums and then have it appear in the playlists for both albums.