Smart PlayLists Documentation/Assistance

[Iris]

Been reading lots of posts trying to get up to speed and I’m thinking Smart Playlists are something I want to implement – using static at present. In particular, I seem to remember reading that by using smart playlists that the playcount can be incremented and the new value written to the track’s tag. Is that correct? This would be great as then MediaMonkey would autorate those songs based on playcounts, etc.

Anyways, I also would like to know where I can get some more documentation that provides the syntax. Also, is their a thread or link of sorts where someone has posted examples of their smart playlists? Nothing like reading some actual examples to speed up the learning curve!

Thanks

– Iris

[cromei]

Iris,
I am at work right now or I’d put some examples in, however…
I used the wizards on the playlist page and they worked well.
Craig

I will try to post some tonight if I am not in Thanksgiving prep nightmare…

[fizze]

http://trac.fireflyserver.org/wiki/SmartPlaylists

always helpful 🙂

[Iris]

@fizze wrote:

http://trac.fireflyserver.org/wiki/SmartPlaylists

always helpful 🙂

Yeah Fizze, got that.

To Craig, that would be great. The “wizard” I have checked out and it looks like it would be a great start for constructing a smart playlist. However, I’m under the impression that one can construct even more advanced smartplaylists than the wizard provides – that’s perhaps where some examples would be helpful.

Is it true though that by using smart playlists that “playcounts” will be incremented and updated to the tag automatically OR to enable this functionality one has to incorporate some other syntax. If the latter is the case anyone have an example??

One other thing, I see that iTunes uses smart playlists. I have never and do not want to use iTunes. Will that have a bearing on what I’m trying to do here.

Thanks

Iris

[rpedde]

@Iris wrote:

However, I’m under the impression that one can construct even more advanced smartplaylists than the wizard provides – that’s perhaps where some examples would be helpful.

The page fizze posted is the dry, terse, but most accurate description of the smart playlists.

I’ll share with you a couple of the playlists I actually have, though:

“Smiths/Morrissey”:
Artist includes “Smiths” or artist is “Morrissey”

I use “includes” for the first one, because I can never remember if I tag it as “The Smiths” or as “Smiths”. And that way if I tag an album wrong, it’s still right.

If I were really depressed, I’d add a “Artist is “elliot smith”” in there as well. :-/

I tag most of my music genres with categories and subcategories, or with overlapping genres like: “trance/psytrance/goa” so I can do genre queries that are specific:

genre includes “psytrance”

or ones that are looser:

genre includes “trance”

If that makes sense. A lot of times I make a quick smart playlist for something I just want to listen to right now, and delete the playlist later — my laptop is right here by the couch, so it’s easy to open it up and make a playlist.

Another one I keep all the time is a recently added playlist. I like to listen to stuff as an album, and I usually listen to new stuff over and over again for a while. Don’t ask me why, it’s just how I listen to music.

So I have a “recently added” playlist like:

time_added after 1 month before today

Which gets stuff I’ve added in the last week.

here’s a playlist that gets good music that isn’t my wifes:

rating > 80 and genre !includes “country”

Or, just to keep my wife’s icky music out altogether:

path !includes “/music/linda/”

which corresponds to the directory fragement where my wife puts her “music”.

Is it true though that by using smart playlists that “playcounts” will be incremented and updated to the tag automatically OR to enable this functionality one has to incorporate some other syntax. If the latter is the case anyone have an example??

Play counts and play times are updated automatically, but I don’t have a “top n” playlist specifier that would make it worthwhile, but the data is being accumulated right now for when there are more flexible playlist criteria.

One other thing, I see that iTunes uses smart playlists. I have never and do not want to use iTunes. Will that have a bearing on what I’m trying to do here.

No relation, except that it was a good idea that I wanted to steal. 🙂

— Ron

[Iris]

@rpedde wrote:

Play counts and play times are updated automatically, but I don’t have a “top n” playlist specifier that would make it worthwhile, but the data is being accumulated right now for when there are more flexible playlist criteria.

I have been playing around since my last post. Created a smart playlist that included one track by title. The playlist was created successfully and played on through the SB. However, upon checking in MediaMonkey and also the properties of the file I see no evidence that the count was incremented or the last played time was updated. The only thing I saw was under the track’s properties where it showed the Last Accessed time as the time the track was played. Am I missing something here?

Shouldn’t (according to your reply) the playcount be incremented after the track is done playing? Is it updated when some other event takes place likes shutting down FireFly? Or, did I misunderstand your reply?

Iris

[rpedde]

@Iris wrote:

Shouldn’t (according to your reply) the playcount be incremented after the track is done playing? Is it updated when some other event takes place likes shutting down FireFly? Or, did I misunderstand your reply?

Those are stored internally in the database. AFAIK, there is no standard tag to store playcount in the file itself (and firefly doesn’t write back tags in any event), and I believe your music management program stores it internally as well.

So both of those are in the database and available for writing playlists, but they aren’t externally visible.

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