Easy Playlists in J River Media Center

[NishanF]

I was reading through the threads on creating JRMC playlists, and the consenus was that J River does not export XML format playlists. It turns out that this is not true. At least in the later versions of V11 and V12, the .mpl option on playlist exports is actually a XML format identical to the media library. This makes creating playlists trivial:

1. Make a playlist in j river
2. Export it to a file in the .mpl format
3. Open the file in Word and replace the "Album" tag with your playlist name

I use the following find and replace macros to automate the process
- Find: "Album"*\</Field\>
- Replace: "Album">YourPlayListName</Field>

4. Tack the file on the end of your overall repository file and reload your database.

Using J river to make the playlist is much quicker than copying and pasting individual entries in the XML file.

Step 3 and 4 take about a minute, but if someone could write a quick program, it would be almost seamless.

Two caveats:
1. If the album art is left as folder.jpg, the coverart will be the first item in the XML list.
2. The order the items play is defined by the original track numbers, so you might also want to change those if you want.

nishan

[IVB]

Thanks to RDF for pointing this thread out.

Re:Your caveats, i'm not following.
1) Is there an issue if the coverart is the first item in the XML list? I didn't stick with folder.jpeg, they're all put into a specified location so JRMC uses a naming convention, so may not apply.
2) Do you change those track #s in the XML file itself?
3) What program do you use to open it up, notepad or a real XML editor?

Thanks for writing this up, i'll try it in a few mins!

[NishanF]

Hey IVB,
I missed this post while on vacation. Did it work for you?

In regards to your questions, I think the cover art is always the first item in the album list. I edited the track numbers directly in the xml file. I opened up the xml file in Word and used it's find/replace functions to edit.

To be honest, I haven't really used this much since I first got it to work. I'm still holding out for a easy way to generate persistent playlists on the fly.

thanks,
Nishan

[IVB]

Still having issues.

1) I can't get the automated search/replace to work
2) I manually changed the album title, added to XML, but it results in 0 albums being loaded into CQC when I ReloadDB. I tried it with just one song, same result.

Do I change anything other than Album and Track #?

[NishanF]

IVB,

Sorry for the long delay in getting back to you. I haven't used this much, so I had to sit back down and try everything from scratch.

Initially the find/replace didn't work for me either. Then I saw that in the dialog box for find/replace, there is a button for "More" options. There you have to check the box that says "Use Wildcards". After that, the find/replace works.

When you tack the playlist XML file onto the end of your main XML file, be sure to only copy the stuff that is between the <item> tags. There are two lines at the top of the playlist file and one line at the bottom that should not be copied. The playlist file then get placed at the end of your XML file, right before the final </MPL> tag. Take a look at the files, it's hard to describe, but pretty clear when looking at them.

Otherwise everything seems to work as described. Also, if you change the text in the <genre> field to "playlist" for example, you will have a separate category for all of your playlists.

hope this helps,

Nishan

[IVB]

Well, the party is tonight so I created a workaround. JRMC has a "copy" function, so I:
1) Created the playlists, then
2) Did a "copy" and put the new files into "MyMusic\playlists\Playlist #1" , "MyMusic\playlists\Playlist #2".
3) I then created a view which showed disk location, and
4) re-tagged everything in "Playlist#1" into an album called "Playlist#1"
5) re-import

and bada-bing, works fine. I'm down to 700GB free on my RAID1, so I don't mind wasting the space temporarily.