AutoPlaylist Creation

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DaledeSilva
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AutoPlaylist Creation

Post by DaledeSilva »

Hello,

many people have requested that IS IN playlist or IS NOT IN playlist (etc.) can be incorporated into the autoplaylist function.

This is very handy, but I would also like to see a programming style implementation like winamp has... MM already has this in other areas of it's program so why not here?

eg. a simple example

Artist >3* Autoplaylist:
<Artist>="Kanye West" AND Rating>3
would make a playlist with kanye west tracks that are greater than 3 stars

and then we could complicate things more quite easily:
( <Artist>="Kanye West" OR <Artist>="Puff Daddy" ) AND Rating>3
would make a playlist of all Kanye West tracks and Puff Daddy tracks that are greater than 3 stars.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a way to make a autoplaylist do this, even being able to use playlist as a field in the autoplaylist.

This method should also support the other things that the synchronise section supports... eg
<Artist:3> != "the"
The above would make a playlist of all files that don't have "the" as the first three letters of the artist name.

Using this programming style would mean 2 things:

1. complex playlists are easily creatable.
2. autoplaylists could be created by scripts that feed the line and title to MM to be created (see below)

eg. I could write a script that makes an autoplaylist for any artist in your library that has more than 5 tracks that are greater than 3 stars.

once the script has figured out what artsists to create for (and stores the name in an array), it does a loop which with all those artists to create the playlists:
loop for all artists
...new autoplaylist
...autoplaylist criteria = "<AnyTextField>=" + artist + " AND rating>3"
...autoplaylist = artist + " > 3 Stars"
end loop
the above script would take an array of artists and then create an autoplaylist for each of them that contains any track which mentions their name and has more than 3 stars. It then names the track "Kanye West > 3 Stars" . etc.
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DaledeSilva
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Post by DaledeSilva »

Also... while I'm at it, a note about using playlists as a field in autoplaylists:

I used Itunes for a while and it's no secret that I HATED it.. however, this function was good as it let you create more complicated playlists.

HOWEVER, there was a pain in the arse flaw with it and definite room for improvement.

The way it worked was that it said playlist "IS" or "IS NOT" and would give you a drop down of playlists to choose from.

because it referenced the playlist directly.. if you deleted one of the playlists that was being referenced and recreated it, you would have to fix ALL of the autoplaylists that were referencing it as they would be broken.

It also meant that if you saved your playlists out and reimported them later, the id's of the referenced playlists would be different and it wouldn't find them.

A better way of organising this would be to treat the names of the playlists as a string field.

for Example, the autplaylist field would say
Playlist name contains "something"
so to reference the playlist I created in my last post.. I could say:
Playlist name contains "Kanye West > 3 Stars"
or if I had multiple kanye west playlists, and I wanted to include tracks from all of them:
Playlist name contains "Kanye West"
this means that you can delete the kanye west playlists and the new playlist which references those lists doesn't get broken, it simply doesn't find any playlists with the letter "Kanye West" in the title and therefore doesn't find any tracks... However, as soon as you create another playlist with "Kanye West" in it's name.. it will find tracks again.
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Bex
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Location: Sweden

Post by Bex »

The developers has already said that this area will have a have upgrade in the next major release (2.6).

In the meantime you could look into Magic Nodes where you almost can accomplish these things.

/Bex
Advanced Duplicate Find & Fix Find More From Same - Custom Search. | Transfer PlayStat & Copy-Paste Tags/AlbumArt between any tracks.
Tagging Inconsistencies Do you think you have your tags in order? Think again...
Play History & Stats Node Like having your Last-FM account stored locally, but more advanced.
Case & Leading Zero Fixer Works on filenames too!

All My Scripts
DaledeSilva
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Post by DaledeSilva »

Thanks Bex, I assumed as much.. just wanted to identify how I think it should be done as I expect that it won't be done this way, rather, more similar options like those already there will be available.

I also meant to point out how 'not' to do the playlist option.

do you have a link to where the developers talk about what they're going to do in more specifics?

Dale.
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Building at the intersection of motion, art, and code.
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Lowlander
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Post by Lowlander »

No the developers have not disclosed that. Generally the first alpha's give you an idea and allow you to comment on them too.

There are many topics on this issue and most discussed the same as this one. Many people desire this and/or/not options.
Some suggestions included an additional sql query tab (or mediamonkey query tab) where one could code the condition (more powerful than the click and select method).
Last edited by Lowlander on Wed May 31, 2006 9:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DaledeSilva
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Post by DaledeSilva »

thanks lowlander.. I'm glad to hear you mention those things because it means it's more likely to happen.

thanks again.

Dale out.
Product Designer & Indie Developer.
Building at the intersection of motion, art, and code.
Find me on twitter and all the other ones here.
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