Author Topic: Want to Share Playlists Only by Album/Track info and NOT File Name  (Read 1188 times)

Mauser69

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I keep two copies of my Library - One machine has everything in Lossless format on a RAID array; this is my "Source" library, but I rarely use that machine to play any of the music.

Everything is the source library is converted to a "Player" library on my NAS in standard quality MP3 format, and all other devices access that player library for general playback.  In addition, I use playlists to copy/sync these smaller MP3 files to various portable devices.

I want to be able to export those playlists from the player library and add them back to the machine that maintains the source library, but I have not found a way to do this with MusicBee yet.  It seems that this should be possible by using playlists in XSPF format, but everything I have tried results in MusicBee stubbornly insisting on dragging the old file names along with the playlist when it is imported to a different machine.

Using relative file paths or mapping base file paths is not a solution in this situation, since virtually all of the actual file names use different file extensions.  So I need a way to move a playlist based on some combination of Album/Artist/Track#, etc.  Does anyone know how this can be done?  Thanx

frankz

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A playlist is a list of files to play, so, naturally, it will output file names as its basic core function.

It sounds like you're looking more to copy a list of tags from the tracks in a playlist and then paste those tags into a text file which will be imported onto the other system.  I don't know that there's any automated way to do this.  It is possible, with the Additional Tagging and Reporting Tools plugin, to copy a custom list of tags and paste them into an external text editor.  I do this all the time.  You may want to start there and poke around to see if there's anything you can work out.

Mauser69

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The XSPF playlist format was SPECIFICALLY developed for exactly this purpose - to share a list of objects, such as audio tracks, between unrelated software or machines where there can be no meaningful reference to the underlying file structure.  The sharing issue is the germane point here.  This quote is directly from the xspf.org web site:  "The guiding design principle was to separate the functionality of a catalog of files from the functionality of a list of songs."

MusicBee supports exporting and importing XSPF playlists, so the problem seems to be a failure in the way it handles this format - perhaps simply lacking an option to ignore file names or something similar.  It would seem to be a rather simple option to provide a switch on the import of an XSPF playlist to resolve the file names from the Library based on the Organize Files naming template.  Or possibly a switch on the export function to omit file names (perhaps as simple as setting the Map Base File Path as "*.*" to [blank] ) - that would depend on how MusicBee currently deals with the import of an XSPF playlist that does not contain file names.  

Since the file name is an optional extension in XSPF, theoretically the capability to handle this issue is already built into MusicBee.  This is what the XSPF design team refers to as a "content resolver".

I have much more to learn about MusicBee, so I was hoping someone else already knew how to deal with this issue (if it is even possible).  Maybe I'll just have to submit an enhancement request and hope for the best?
Last Edit: May 31, 2018, 09:57:18 PM by Mauser69