Oct
18
2006

Winamp Playlist Sorting Revisited

(Add / View Comments) (0)Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 08:07:26 pm
(Posted Under: Music Music, Winamp)
So, I guess I spoke too soon! [wink] Playlist sorting in Winamp 5.21 is better, but it still doesn't fully work.

The following playlist
M:\Albums\Dead Hot Workshop - White House
M:\Albums\Dead Hot Workshop - River Otis
M:\Albums\Dead Hot Workshop - 1001
M:\Albums\Dead Hot Workshop - Old Favorites & New Ones Too
M:\Albums\Dead Hot Workshop - Karma Covered Apple
Loads Feliz Navidad (Old Favorites & New Ones Too) last, after Strangers (Karma Covered Apple).

And the follow playing
M:\Albums\Gin Blossoms - Dusted
M:\Albums\Gin Blossoms - Up And Crumbling
M:\Albums\Gin Blossoms - New Miserable Experience
M:\Albums\Gin Blossoms - Congratulations I'm Sorry
M:\Albums\Gin Blossoms - Major Lodge Victory (Advance)
Loads Cheatin' (New Miserable Experience) after California Sun (Major Lodge Victory).

In the words of Brent Babb, oh well. [wink] Looks like it's going to be a case of shell scripts to generate full artist playlists after all!
Now Playing: Dead Hot Workshop - Oh Well
Oct
18
2006

Winamp Playlist Sorting

Upgrading to Winamp 5.21

(Add / View Comments) (0)Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 06:22:41 pm
(Posted Under: Music Music, Winamp)
It's back! Finally.

I've been running Winamp 5.08c since Jan 2005, and putting up with the lack of sorting the whole time. I think that could have been one on of the main reasons for my love affair with Media Library over that time. To that end, my usage of playlists has been hardly existent, thanks to Media Library - I've had my music moved to a Samba share for near on 10 months now, yet my old playlists still remain on my desktop,

Though, recently I've done some playlist related stuff - particularly to automatically generate playlists for all albums and live recordings on my share. I can't remember my intent for this - momentary bordem, or specifically for my laptop. Because I use Automatically Remove Missing Files in Media Library, and it can be a huge pain in the ass when I desperately have to listen to something, and Media Library is empty - particularly caused when I've swapped to using wireless and I can't access my access point right before Media Library is about to rescan. It was either that, or bordem. Or actually, what I think it was was ocassional frustration in Media Library sorting when creating a playlist...yes! That's right, given that I sort by artist name in Media Library, it was getting annoying enqueuing Live At Last Exit Vol. 1 and hearing Andy Hersey's A Diamond Won't Cut It instead of The Black Mood's Sick In Bed ("come oooooon, come ooon, come ooon!" [smile] ). And hence sorting by track number, enqueing, and then having to return to sort by artist later on....which I would never until I had listened to 5 track #1's from artists that start with 'A' [wink]. Yeah, I think that was the motivation force between auto generation of playlists.

Which brings me to today - another occurance of not having a huge sway on what I want to listen to, enqueuing everything from Media Library and turning shuffle on, and then realising I really don't want to listen to Michael Jackson, Sarah McLaughlan, Garbage or any amount of other stuff that I just have on here for the sake of it. To even the odds, I need an Arizona rock playlist, which I can bookmark, and easily queue and hit shuffle. This is neither a new realisation, or a first attempt. Over the last 10 months, I've started writing something to do just that on several occassions - just never followed through. However, today I've written a shell script that works well enough - searches through my album and live recording playlists for Arizona based artists, and concating those into one playlist - called from cron, to automatically update it.

This is turn got me thinking about how it'd be cool to reference the source playlists from within the playlist, rather than concatenate all of the contents. So after some searching on the M3U format, it wasn't too hard to learn that you can't reference a M3U from within a M3U. Winamp doesn't support it, and searches today seemed to confirm that the format itself doesn't. It's pretty stupid and annoying actually (if you ask me), but you write a song about a porno star, fine.

From there (with my initial goal achieved anyway), I thought about how it'd be nice to have playlists of all albums by an artist, but in chronological release date. Without significant work (aka: reading ID3 tags), this would be impossible, because I don't classify my stuff with year (other than inside ID3 tags), and would not be a fun task from a shell script. And more to the point, the pay off wouldn't really be worth the effort. Still, it'd be nice to have playlists with albums, without having to list out each song of each album. Referencing album playlists is out, I've discovered. But, what if I reference a directory inside a M3U file?

Sweet! Works fine, except for that damn Winamp issue where the files are read in order of FAT allocation (or god knows what over Samba - inode, and then the order in which Samba delivers them - the mind boggles [wink] ). An issue that has been around, in one form or another, since Winamp 2.x. Which is a pain in the ass, because it's really a simple thing. (Side note: it's entertaining reading Winamp forum messages from circa 2000, where developers and moderates blame Windows for the bug. I don't doubt the Windows API is doing something it shouldn't - I have vague recollections of drag and drop having a sort parameter, but it not working properly in practise - but for cryin' out loud, Winamp can be changed to fix it, by ignoring what Windows does and sorting itself! [smile] ). Anyways, where was I? Oh yes. Kinda frustrating, using Winamp 5.x and still being plagued from issues I remember having 8 years ago! [smile] I messed around with the When loading multiple files, sort files by name option, with no luck.

In anycase, doing a bit of a search around, I discovered that this is fixed in Winamp 5.2 - which as it turns out, I've been running on my laptop since...well, probably since Jan this year - just without the aforementioned option selected. Turning it on, everything is sweet - including my whole 'referencing album directories' idea. Cool!

So, I have just upgraded my main machine to 5.21 also - saving grace is that I have already been using it for 10 months on my laptop, so I knew what I was in for, which made the upgrading easier. Still, I must say, I prefer the 5.08c version of Media Library. The icons to the left in the navigation, I really don't like - I wish they could be disabled / have the look of the older Media Library. That, and the added shit (Online Services, SHOUTcast Wire, Portables and Predixis MusicMagic) which I would prefer not to have there. Plus, I don't like "Rip and Burn" - name it "Devices", like the old version, please! Lord knows I'm never going to rip, nor burn anything from inside Winamp. I may have to do some hacking to Winamp5\plugins\ml tonight! [wink]

In anycase, playlist sorting finally seems fixed, which is good, as it's been the bane of my existance. [smile] When I want to listen to Dead Hot Workshop's discography, hearing White House after Old Favorites & New Ones Too always screws with me. [wink] Those days, they seem to be over - yaaaaaay!
Now Playing: Dead Hot Workshop - Saddamizing Hussein

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