Windows Media Player -generated m3u playlists on NSLU2

[samsaidi]

Hi,

Apologies if this is a repeat thread but I’ve searched as much as I can!
I am trying to move away from WMC 2.0 running on my PC to rely totally on my NSLU2 (unslung 6.8, running Firefly svn-1417) to serve my Roku etc. All my playlists are generated in WMP as m3u and I don’t have a problem with them when running in WMP. They will also run fine when playing in other media players (such as MediaMonkey) and *were* running OK in Firefly

Now the problem: Since I moved my WMP library from my fixed drive (D:music) to my NSLU2 (\192.168.1.77disk 2MUSIC mapped as S:MUSIC), all m3u playlists generated or updated by WMP are using absolute paths (eg \192.168.1.77disk 2MUSICSinglestrack1.wma instead of ….Singlestrack1.wma). Obviously the NSLU2 can’t recognise the windows path, and I can’t see any way to force WMP to save relative paths (have tried moving the playlist folder and editing the registry but to no avail)

Does anybody have any suggestions (other than a different media player, which I wanted to avoid)? Thanks for your help

Sam

[rpedde]

@samsaidi wrote:

Does anybody have any suggestions (other than a different media player, which I wanted to avoid)? Thanks for your help

Are you tied to wmp as a playlist editor? Perhaps a different playlist editor would work better?

I think there have been calls for comments on playlist editors before, but I don’t remember specifically what people recommended. maybe they will add some suggestions here.

[wolfzell]

You already mentioned MediaMonkey.

MediaMonkey has several ways to export its playlists.

By default there is the option to right-click on the playlist, sending the playlist to a m3u file which gives you relative paths.

So if all your music is in say “Y:MP3” and you save your m3u file in the same directory (“Y:MP3”), then you will have entries without the “Y:MP3”.

If you leave those lists there, Firefly can read them. That is the way I am doing it right now (Only I do have a copy of my tracks in C:MP3, working there and copying the m3us from there to Y:MP3. Works fine for me.

The other option in MediaMonkey is in the Export Menu, where you can export *all* playlists at once. This is an external script which is unfortunately for you generating absolute paths. (Every entry in the example above will start with “Y:MP3”)

But: One of the MM-scripters (trixmoto) was so friendly to change that script for me, so now it also *will* write relative paths. But that script is not included with MediaMonkey by default. You can find the thread for the script (and the script) with a search for “Modified ExportM3U” in the forum or by clicking here

If installed right, you will end up with two entries in the Export Menu. One for exporting with relative paths and the old one with absolute paths.

I hope this will help.

bye
Wolfgang

[samsaidi]

Thanks for that. I maybe didn’t make myself clear – I really want to use WMP as my main media player, and organise all my playlists from there. I know MM can do relative playlists which work fine, but the music library interface is pretty clunky, so I am not that keen on using it as my default media plyer.

[rpedde]

@samsaidi wrote:

Thanks for that. I maybe didn’t make myself clear – I really want to use WMP as my main media player, and organise all my playlists from there. I know MM can do relative playlists which work fine, but the music library interface is pretty clunky, so I am not that keen on using it as my default media plyer.

The only way I could think to do something like that, then would be to use some kind of scripting tool, like “cut” for win32 or something… a batch file something like this:

@echo off

cat %1 | find /v "#" | cut -b 29- > "\192.168.1.77disk 2MUSIC%~n1

might probably do the trick. Uhh.. that would be a drop target, btw. Just make that as a “.bat” file, put it on your desktop and drop a .m3u on it… it should fix it and copy it over to the slug.

You’ll need a win32 version of “cut”, but something like that would be close.

— Ron

[samsaidi]

Thanks Ron,
It’s probably easier to do that as a shell script, I used:

#!/bin/bash

echo "correcting absolute entries"

sed -i 's/\\192.168.1.77\disk 2\MUSIC/..\../g' /public/MUSIC/Windows Media Player/My Playlists/*m3u #

chown guest:everyone /public/MUSIC/Windows Media Player/My Playlists/*m3u

bearing in mind case-sensitivity (disk 2/DISK 2) and permissions (hence the chown)

Is it possible to add the script into the firefly .conf in such a way that it runs everytime a rescan is forced? That should solve the problem

Regards

Sam

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