Noob questions – mt-daapd and playlists

[Anonymous]

I own a Roku Soundbridge (love it!) and have recently installed Ubuntu (love it!) on my desktop PC. I installed mt-daapd (stable release) successfully and started ripping my CDs into the Ubuntu music directory. The Soundbridge found Firefly on my home network, and I can successfully play music.
However, I have no clue about how to organize my music on the server – I’d like to set up several playlists like “70sMusic”, “CountryMusic”, “PartyMix”, etc. So far, I’ve been unsuccessful with playlists. So, I have a few questions:

1. When I’m ripping my CDs, do I have to assign the “genre” myself?
2. Does the sub-directory structure under my music directory (/home/music) have anything to do with playlists (will mt-daapd search thru directory hierarchies)?
3. What music is included in the default smart playlist #1?
4. It seems that the selection criteria for smart playlists are global tags, so I don’t have much control over which albums/songs get included in a playlist. Is there any way to build a playlist manually, perhaps by dragging selected albums into a sub-directory?

TIA for your help!!

[Anonymous]

Texasranger

Yup, getting all the tags correctly filled in will greatly enhance your listening pleasure.

The ones that normally get overlooked are genre and year, both are extremely useful for selecting music in smart playlists.

The sub directory structure has nothing to do with playlists.

Default smartplaylist 1, I believe is every song in the database.

There are lot’s of ways to create playlists. The Smart ones are created on the fly by a series of selection criteria, you could Amarok or any of the other MP3 players, alot of them have the ability to select multiple MP3s and save a playlist as either a .m3u or .pls file that firefly can read if so enabled in the configuration.

I prefer to use only smartplaylists, and a lot of those playlists are based upon the contents of the “Group” tag in iTunes. This allows me to create nested playlists and make for very quick selection. But that’s the way I do it. I have also used MusicIP Mixer for creating playlists based upon the mood of the music, that is usually a good way for me to listen to artists I wouldn’t normally choose.

[Anonymous]

Busta123, thanks for the info! I’ll look into the two packages you mentioned to help me tag my rips and organize them into playlists.[/quote]

[Anonymous]

No problem

I have used Tag&Rename for fixing a lot of tags and it is really very good at it.

[Author]

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