MSAcess/Excel access to Firefly database?

@jmang wrote:

I am running Firefly svn-1489 on a DNS-323 serving Roku Soundbridge. I installed Firefly using a package I obtained via another Web forum. (I realize this is a less-than-current version of Firefly, but it is the only one I know of that is available for the DNS.)

Firefly works great! I now have more than 600 CDs, more than 7,000 tracks, on the DNS. I have been using an Excel file containing some VBA macros I wrote to manage the library. I used some parts of the Windows Media Player API to retrieve tag information from the mp3 files to generate album and track lists. I also generate m3u playlists for each album so I can find albums by album title within artist and play them in track number sequence.

But this functionality is somewhat cumbersome and slow because it has to walk the directory structure to find the mp3 files in order to get tag information. Also, the track timings I get in this manner are not accurate.
I would like to build an interactive playlist builder so I could basically drag-and-drop tracks into playlists, but I would pretty much have to build my own database to make this work well.

I would much prefer to obtain music library information from the Firefly database.

Can you recommend software that would provide an ODBC connection to the Firefly database? This would allow me to reuse much of what I already have in Excel VBA and extend it as I wish.

Thanks.

J

here’s what teh google says about sqlite and odbc:

http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/

Haven’t used it, but that might help. I’d guess the version you have uses sqlite 2, not sqlite 3. Also, some warnings:

1. You’ll want to change the directory the db is stored in by firefly. That’s the db_param config value. If you put it somewhere that’s accessible via smb, then you can access it from the server or by odbc at the same time.

2. You don’t want to have auto rescanning, or be playing media while you are editing the database. If there is locking contention, the server will fall over. So either turn off background scans, or stop the server while you mess with the database.

3. You’ll need to grok the schema by observation. Make a playlist or drop a m3u file in the scan directory and observe the data that gets filled in when it pumps the m3u data in. HINT – you’ll want to use a playlist type of “0”, else it will get whacked when it rescans.

That should get you going, though.

— Ron