I Want a PlayList Manager!

[RalphieBoy]

Hi, here are my suggestions for how Media Monkey could be enhanced, specifically with regard to playlists and playlist management...

I don't know why, but for all the MP3 software products I've tried, playlist management seems to be an afterthought, if thought of at all. Since MediaMonkey seems to be a happening and responsive product, I thought I'd air my views here...

1. Offer a checkbox/toggle option that says, "when adding new songs to a playlist, I [do / do not] want to allow duplicates". Simple, yeah? Just scan to see if the file is already there before adding it. That alone would help tremendously, as I could always "add" stuff to a list, just to make sure it's there, without worrying about duplicates...

2. Offer a chance to clean up playlists to remove files that no longer exist. With all the options for MP3 tag cleanup, renaming files based on tags, etc, playlists often become out of sync and useless. At least this would help a little, because some programs / devices that use playlists are pretty stupid, and freak out if a song in the list doesn't exist.

3. And this is the important one: When I highlight a playlist, I want the songs that are in the playlist to be highlighted IN MY LIBRARY. That way, I can graphically SEE which songs are in the playlist. I don't want to simply be shown a linear list of 1,000 songs, that I have to scroll through with a fine-tooth comb to make sense of.

4. Of course, to make the above useful, when selected playlist's songs are highlighted in the library, you should be able to right-click on the highlighted songs and say "Remove from Playlist", or right-click on an unselected song (or artist/album, of course) and say "Add to Playlist".

5. Allow a feature that takes one (or all) playlists, and performs a path substitution. This would help when I try to copy my playlists to my portable MP3 jukebox. The jukebox supports playlists, but the root of the song path ends up being different than on my home computer, and they won't work unless I open the playlist in a text editor and perform a "Replace All" before transferring them.

Thanks for letting me vent. All I know is that I'm tired of managing my playlists with freakin' Notepad. I'm also tired of having read-only, unmanageable, non-hierarchical views of a playlist that might have 1,000 songs in it. Why can't I manage my playlists by cross-correlating against my hierarchical library display?

If anyone knows of a program that can do all this, please e-mail me at ralph@edington.com.

Cheers!

[rusty]

Ralph,

fyi, you might want to give MM 2.2 RC-1 a try. It solves several of the issues you raise:
2) Playlists in MM are dynamic--they always update to reflect any changes made to files. Note: you must Export the playlists as .m3u files if you wish the m3u files to be updated.

4) Send to playlist / and the playlist toolbar button kind of do this.

5) Portable device synchronization is supported. .m3u files exported to the playlist are dynamically updated to match paths of tracks exported (and the tracks are exported to the device in an organized fashion.

Rusty

[Lowlander]

1 Is on the wishlist.

3&4 Don't really make sense too me. Maybe because my library is huge and these highlighted songs would be lost in the listings anyway.

There is an item on the wishlist that could aid a little and that is taking a playlist listing up in the song properties. That way you could quickly see the playlists a certain song is on.


And lastly you might want to play with the Gold version of MM 2.2. You can create autoplaylists and with the advanced search criteria you can create very powerful playlists.

I would say that MM has very powerful playlist tools incorporated. Of course changes are welcomed to make it even better.

[SIMJEDI]

1b. Add another check-box(s) that would allow Media Monkey to randomly choose 1,2,3 or however many songs from each album for a playlist, then for another playlist be able to generate songs that was not on the other one before the same way.

Interested in party cd's here with the minimum servo wear and tear on the nice cd changer from switching disk all the time and for the portable to hear the maximum randomality per cd.

Strongly agree that is one area greatly overlooked.


peace

[Lowlander]

Managing duplicates over playlists was just requested.

You guys might want to look into autoplaylists in combination with the last played field. You can set up a playlist as you wish and with the last played field you can prevent songs that you have played within the last 1 (or whatever) days to show up on the playlist. This prevents you from playing songs double during parties.
If you set up all playlists like this you might have duplicates on playlists, but these duplicates will be deleted from the autoplaylists if they have been played before in your set limit.
This might actually work better as preventing duplicates on playlists will be arbitrary. It will be on one only, but you can't control which (and if you could it would involve a lot of work). But with the autoplaylists songs would be by default on all the playlists which query it meets. But would be eliminated if the song had been played.
There are also other queries you could use to limit duplicates being played.

[zephyr]

For Ralph : happy new year/

One of the coolest scripts in town.

Here's to Bex, ZvedD, Steegy, Psy, and the god Trixmoto...

We're not worthy.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... e+playlist

[windcrest77]

Hi, here are my suggestions for how Media Monkey could be enhanced, specifically with regard to playlists and playlist management...

I don't know why, but for all the MP3 software products I've tried, playlist management seems to be an afterthought, if thought of at all. Since MediaMonkey seems to be a happening and responsive product, I thought I'd air my views here...

1. Offer a checkbox/toggle option that says, "when adding new songs to a playlist, I [do / do not] want to allow duplicates". Simple, yeah? Just scan to see if the file is already there before adding it. That alone would help tremendously, as I could always "add" stuff to a list, just to make sure it's there, without worrying about duplicates...

2. Offer a chance to clean up playlists to remove files that no longer exist. With all the options for MP3 tag cleanup, renaming files based on tags, etc, playlists often become out of sync and useless. At least this would help a little, because some programs / devices that use playlists are pretty stupid, and freak out if a song in the list doesn't exist.

3. And this is the important one: When I highlight a playlist, I want the songs that are in the playlist to be highlighted IN MY LIBRARY. That way, I can graphically SEE which songs are in the playlist. I don't want to simply be shown a linear list of 1,000 songs, that I have to scroll through with a fine-tooth comb to make sense of.

4. Of course, to make the above useful, when selected playlist's songs are highlighted in the library, you should be able to right-click on the highlighted songs and say "Remove from Playlist", or right-click on an unselected song (or artist/album, of course) and say "Add to Playlist".

5. Allow a feature that takes one (or all) playlists, and performs a path substitution. This would help when I try to copy my playlists to my portable MP3 jukebox. The jukebox supports playlists, but the root of the song path ends up being different than on my home computer, and they won't work unless I open the playlist in a text editor and perform a "Replace All" before transferring them.

Thanks for letting me vent. All I know is that I'm tired of managing my playlists with freakin' Notepad. I'm also tired of having read-only, unmanageable, non-hierarchical views of a playlist that might have 1,000 songs in it. Why can't I manage my playlists by cross-correlating against my hierarchical library display?

If anyone knows of a program that can do all this, please e-mail me at ralph@edington.com.

Cheers!

I have another addition... A time of day column.

If I create a playlist it would be nice to be able to add a column to the playlist grid that displays the actual time of day each song in the playlist will be played whenever and wherever the playlist is started (or stopped and restarted). I do DJ work using MM and sometimes I have a certain time of day that something else needs to happen like the band will be off break, I need to play a birthday dance at 10:05, somebody needs me to step away for 10 minutes, I gotta go collect money at the door, somebody wants to dance with me, etc. If I have a running actual time of day column in my current playlist then I could more easily plan how many songs to drop into the list and know an exact time I can go off "auto pilot" and need to run back to the board. This will enable me to leave my post and know certain timings in case I am juggling multiple tasks. Intervals and total play time are nice, but when I step away all I have is my watch and I want my playlist to simply tell me what time of day a song will be ending and I should walk back, or what time of day it will be when these x number of songs songs finish, etc..

I like the duplicate suggestion, just a simple pop up warning "Dude, that song is already in the playlist. Add it anyway? Yes / No" Seems like a warning that should have always been in MM. It is pretty embarassing to have the same song repeat.

[hanginwithdaddo]

I second having an option on playlists to cleanup the given playlist, removing files that no longer exist, similar to the "remove duplicates" option.

[Peke]

If you add whole playlist to Now playing you can remove inaccessible that then you can use to overwrite old playlist.

Also you can globally remove inaccessible tracks under files to edit -> Dead links.

[Media_Allen]

It's kind of funny; what I see here are users wanting app-independent play list behavior, and Media Monkey wanting to be all "Apple-esque", with everything being MM-centric. Of course, you can sync to a portable device... BUT only if that device is running MM! (and you bought the premium product, as with Android) and of course, it's not a proprietary music player or "jukebox" that can't run MM!

It's the double-edged sword we see with iTunes, where it wants to stand between you and your content and "serve" it to you, except that with most OS's, you can alter the content behind MM, defeating or undermining its control. The fact that so many users do that illustrates that the user interface is more of a hindrance than a help. (iTunes is also more of a hindrance, but those users accepted being serially "hosed" when they bought into the platform)

[Lowlander]

You don't need MediaMonkey on your device to sync to it (just wifi sync requires it). It has benefits (2 way tag/playlist syncing & wifi sync), but it is not required. You can actually sync with a plethora of devices that don't have a MediaMonkey version for it.

[Peke]

Hi,
To add to above, it is just the matter of setting. As example I use MMA to WiFi Sync to My Car Head Unit in order to have full benefits of playlists and playback order I want, but due the Hardware limited EQ support I use native player for playback mostly and only thing I needed to figure was right kind of settings options and file path destination.