Author Topic: SmartPlaylists to iTunes xml - MB sorting not passed on ? (for Serato / Traktor)  (Read 2585 times)

alec.tron

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Heya,
with MB smartPlaylists, when setting one to a specific sorting inside of MB (and since, when exported to itunes xml they seem to become static [opposed to transferring the rule-set from how it looks...) I would have assumed that the MB set sorting/order is kept on export, as it is for MB statics' playlists, when accessed through iTunes xml.
Whereas when I open the resulting xml, either itself or in programs utilizing the itunes xml, the iTunes playlists that have been generated from SmartPlaylists in MB are set to file-system based alphabetical sorting (or, to be anal, by itunes <key> Track ID </key>, which is equal to alphabetic file system based ordering from what I can see).

I found it odd that there's different behaviours in the resulting iTunes xml, depending on the fact if the MB playlist is static, or dynamic.
Is this intended ? an oversight / edge case (eg a topic for the wishlist section...) ? or a bug ?

Cheers.
c.
Last Edit: April 16, 2017, 12:36:36 AM by alec.tron

alec.tron

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Bump...?

This would solve a lot of issues with Serato (or rather shortcomings in Serato) for me... i.e. after 15 years, they have not managed to implement a ratings column into Serato... let alone correct multi value genre read/write ability (on the contrary, when analyzing bpm/key in Serato, it even trashes all multi value genre tags as it only reads & re-writes the very first it encounters in flac files and deletes all others).
So setting up smart playlist rules that get auto-populated from my MB library and pushing them through the iTunes.xml hook into Serato when needed (i.e. every week or so to pick up the latest changes...), having the sorting transfer was a last-straw for me.
Unfortunately I doubt this is important for many others... but maybe maybe this could be a very simple fix - i.e. why sorting is transferred correctly for static playlists when going to iTunes.xml, but is not when coming from an Auto-Playlist...

Many thanks for considering.
c.

alec.tron

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I guess I'm one of the few trying to use the iTunes xml for anything these days...
But in case anyone has a tip of how I can alter/influence the sorting from MB Auto-Playlists written to the xml, this would make my day/week/month/year :D
Churs.
c.
Last Edit: April 16, 2017, 12:41:36 AM by alec.tron

alec.tron

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Heya,
I found a potential way around this....but there's the next, probably to be expected issue due to unintended usage (on my part...).

For testing this, I export the MusicBee AutoPlaylists to static ones and feed them back into MB's own playlist folder to be picked up on restart.... (not quite the standard use case I admit... :D).
These then, once MB is restarted, appear updated & correctly sorted back in MB as static playlists.
Now I have them as a static playlist where I would need them to be write-able to iTunes xml so it preserves the rating based sorting I am after...
But, since there's now non-unique playlist names (i.e. the autoPlaylist and the static copy of it with the same name- living in different folders) these seem to cause problems for the iTunes xml export... it's hard to tell what is failing as there's no error, but in all cases I tested this, MB stopped writing out the iTunes xml altogether.
So I assume, since the iTunes xml export from MB does not respect the folder structure the playlists live in, non-unique names are probably causing the issues for the iTunes xml export here...

To visualize, this is what the folder/playlist structure looks like, ish:
Code
Playlist Explorer:

_| FolderA
       Playlist123
       Playlist456
_| FolderB (= folder with only Folders / AutoPlaylists)
       _| OrganizationalFolderC
              Auto-Playlist123
              Auto-Playlist456
_| FolderC-staticAutoPlaylists (= re-routed root folder where MB Preferences is pointing to for static playlist export...)
       _| FolderB
              _| OrganizationalFolderC
                     Auto-Playlist123 (=static copy)
                     Auto-Playlist456 (=static copy)

Is there maybe other ways/locations to store Auto-Playlists for MB or exclude them from the iTunes export altogether to avoid the conflict with static copies of them ?
If anyone has an idea/suggestion how one could achieve this, sing out.
Churs.
c.
Last Edit: April 28, 2017, 01:57:58 PM by alec.tron

alec.tron

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In case anyone else is after this - the way around the above is to work in multiple steps to get to where it needs to be to write out auto-playlist content with user-controlled sorting (I'm only after rating based sorting and 'natural sorting' - I will need to play around some more to see if other sorting methods do carry over into static m3us as well to feed an iTunes xml file correctly...).

Since MusicBee itself is fine with having non-unique playlists within folders, I keep them as outlined above for now.
The iTunes xml now fails however without warning every time (again, only an assumption, but I still think due to non-unique playlists names).
So, until I have a better approach, I will, from the starting point above, do the following to get the bits into the iTunes xml to use it in Serato/Traktor/RB:
- update the smart playlists as wanted/needed one last time from within MB to force a static playlist export with the desired content & sorting.
- shut down Musicbee
- move the whole folder with auto-playlists out of MusicBee's /Library/Playlists/ directory.
- double check the static playlists naming (I have had some odd double ups... but most likely a user error)
- restart Musicbee.
- now with the auto playlists out of the picture, and only the static copy of them in MusicBee under a given name (and assuming you do NOT have any non-unique playlists names)
- shut down MusicBee again to now write out the iTunes xml file you can then feed to Serato/Traktor/Rekordbox via the xml hook which now holds all content from your auto-playlists

Very round about way, but I finally got an iTunes xml as I need it to be.
Hope this helps others.
Cheers.
c.
Last Edit: April 30, 2017, 09:21:59 AM by alec.tron