Author Topic: How do I get mp3 files into Musicbee if their suffix isn't .mp3  (Read 3717 times)

planckfund

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Let me explain why I think I need to do this:

I have a lot of thousands of mp3 (and other format) play-along tracks that I use for practising music with. It's nice to just click on the file and get the right program to play these. I use a program called Transcribe because it handles changes of keys, speed etc, repeating sections etc quite well. It was getting annoying to me that I kept double-clicking on these files and getting MusicBee come up. So I changed all the files I just use for practice to a random file type '.tsb' and made the default player, Transcribe instead of MusicBee. Great. Works fine.  But of course these are no longer listed in MusicBee --- but actually that would be nice to have them visible there as well so I could see and use these files in MusicBee if I wanted. But the only way I can think of doing this is just to duplicate all these files with the default .mp3 filetype suffix. That's about 40 Gb of files just for that functionality.  Is there a better way of doing this, or can someone suggest a workaround?

Cheers

Zak

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I don't think there's any way for that to work currently in MusicBee.

From a quick test it looks like MusicBee uses the file extension at least to work out what kind of tags to look for (an mp3 renamed to m4a could be played but no tag values were shown), and a non-recognised file extension can't be added at all. Not too surprising, because in any other circumstances MusicBee should ignore file formats it doesn't know about.

I think the only way that will work for you is to rename all of those .tsb files back to their proper extensions, and then associate those extensions with your Transcribe program. As a bonus, this will make all programs happier, not just MusicBee. e.g. Windows Explorer will show tag values in detail view if it doesn't already. You could also set up Transcribe as an external program and use MusicBee instead of Explorer to search and send it the files you want to practice with.
Bee excellent to each other...

planckfund

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Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply. I don't know MusicBee well enough yet understand how to set up files to open with an external program through MusicBee. But wouldn't that mean that *all* mp3 files would then open with the external program, not just the ones I want to do that? Would it be possible to set a tag, say, and then just have files that match that tag open with an external program? Just a thought.

 I seem to find this problem quite often by the way. For example, if I have a bunch of pdf magazines in a folder I might want to open them with one pdf reader rather than another I use for books by default. There are many occasions when a program seems to be better for a subtype of a filetype rather than the default, and it's probably a weakness of Windows Explorer that you cannot set object-type inheritable methods for folders and descendants as opposed to Windows as a whole, and not intrinsically something lacking in MusicBee or any other program. As you point out, there are all sorts of problems with changing the file suffix to accomplish this. Transcribe is very forgiving but not terribly sophisticated in its file handling so it doesn't seem to cause a problem. MusicBee on the other hand is great for organizing, searching and playing audio files and is in all other respects my music player of choice. Just wish I could get them to work together.... Any thoughts? Thanks for listening!

redwing

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With MB, you can set up external apps under Preferences> Tools. You can also assign a hotkey or a toolbar button for each app. Then select tracks, execute the command, then the external app will open (play) the selected tracks.

With Windows Explorer, you can right-click on a file and select "Open with", then it will give you the list of apps installed on your machine that can open the file. That's for when you want to open files with a non-default app.

Zak

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And just to be clear, to use your tracks with external programs you would select them in MusicBee and then "send" them to the other program.
It doesn't automatically bypass MB's usual behaviour - double-clicking audio files in MusicBee will still play them in MusicBee.
Bee excellent to each other...

planckfund

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Assh, so it's as I thought.  Thanks for explaining how to do it.

Also I've found the easiest (laziest?) way for me to open a file from MusicBee is just to drag and drop it on to Transcribe.  This wouldn't work necessarily for other apps, of course. And having more than 1 screen helps.

The Windows Explorer method I did know. It's just that when you're in the middle of being creative you forget so you just click your file of interest,  then Musicbee opens, you mentally kick yourself again, then you send it away again then you find your file again, right-click it find the alternate program to open the file.....  I'm being picky of course, but my  would be to find a way of setting up an alternate default app for individual music files and have MusicBee control that because we know that Windows Explorer can't.    I know, get a life I hear you say.....

Thanks for all your help, guys.