Hi psychoadept!
Thanks for the reply, here's some more info:
I was on 2_5_5804 initially, but in an attempt to debug this issue or at least find a work around, I also installed 3_0_5909.
This made no difference in regards to m3u playlists in monitored folders - for some reason this just stopped working once I populated the collection and I can set this to folders that hold playlist, but they do not appear in MusicBees Playlists folder (anymore).
I did find a way around this though - I switched the library to use m3u instead of mbp files, and now I can swap/update them pre-start in the main library location, which is not the prettiest way, but it seems to work.
MB seems to be a powerful program, but maybe not the most intuitive... so a have a fair few questions/issues I try to find answers/solutions for (in case someone wants to help a newbie out...
)
- From what I've seen in tests, MusicBee saves (whatever Playlist gets edited inside MB) on top of the same respective m3u file it was imported/created from, so in regards to that, can you lock playlists - i.e. make them completely un-editable in MB ?
- for manual playlist exports, what means do I have to mass-save/export MusicBee's internal playlists ? I found File -> Playlists -> Export Playlists, but this is only for a single playlist (i.e. what is selected)
- the Playlist column in the main library is a godsend! thanks for that... has anyone ever managed to overload that ? i.e. are there users with 100s/1000s of playlist files inside of MusicBee ? or is this just asking for problems... ? (as is, I do have around 250 m3y playlist s imported vua MB's portable install /playlists/location... and there's more to come...
So far I didn't notice any more slowness than before - i.e. the 2-3 sec interval for the Library view to render/display), but thought I'd check...
- I could find a wiki entry for the way MusicBee sets up the colums view - but I could not find where the "default columns" definition actually lives...? i.e. I have set up the columns for the main Library, now I would like to copy it to all other columns views as a starting point. So if anyone could point me to the location where I could find these, that would be great! (i.e. as described here (I might be blind, in case it is described there...)-
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=9684.msg57682#msg57682 )
As for 2 collections - for a clean slate - I used Create New Library functionality - so up top, I now have 2 Libraries, or rather the menu looks as follows:
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Create New Library
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musicBee - D:/data/
Library - C:/programs/
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whereas for the above - "Library - C:/programs/" = default, i.e. MusicBee installation dir (portable), musicBee - D:/data/ = my data/library tree for the user defined one that was created via "Create New Library" - i.e. I assume this is useful when one wants to manage content as different libraries to separate them (?) [i.e. single music tracks VS a collection of mixes/audio books/what have you...]. So unless that is a bad idea, I'll probably leave it as is.
By the by, I also had problems with relative/absolute playlist paths... which is mentioned in the forums a few times. The only solution I found was to rebuild the MusicBee library(and the playlist location) on another partition of the HD. i.e. before it was on the same partition as the music, and even though Preferrences -> Library -> 'relative paths' was switched off, it kept writing files locations inside an exported m3u as:
/../../../../music/something/somewhere/123.flac
to get back into the root of the partition, instead of, eg:
D:/music/something/somewhere/123.flac
As for the iTunes xml issue - does anyone happen to know if that's to come or a no-fix issue ? i.e. this:
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=15165.msg90562#msg90562And finally - is there a console/log function hidden somewhere - I really like to see what programs are doing, especially when they tend to lock up/freeze occasionally, or/and are very powerful and/or handle precious data... ( i.e. the move-file functionality of iTunes, which MB seems to have as well, i.e. auto-sorting/relocatng files, is an absolute nightmare of mine...).
Cheerio.
c.