Trying to think of a solution to a problem

[ed.j]

My desire is that I want to create auto/playlists that work on both MM, and a third party media server that runs off a mirror of the library (on a NAS).

The main problem I'm encountering is that I would like songs to be able to be in more than one playlist. I buy a fair bit of music each month and so ideally, just editing a tag would suffice.

What I have tried so far:

1. Using a Custom field tag. This works, but not for a track that's in more than one "playlist", as the Custom fields do not separate tags with ";" in the same way another field, eg Genre, would.

2. Using the Mood field tag. I thought some hijacking of this field would work because it's a built-in MM field. However we run into the same problem as above, but only for mp3 (and specifically not flac) files - the separator ";" doesn't work properly.

3. I thought "foolproof - just create actual m3u playlists": as the references to the files are relative, it should be ok. BUT... playlists are stored in the MM database. And imported playlists cannot be edited, only viewed. I could export the playlists but this is a real pain, especially as I am constantly adding to my library. Also I have since discovered that this doesn't work anyway because my media server (mininserver) needs forward slashes, not backslashes, for a relative path...

So I'm starting to slowly tear my hair out. There must be a way to achieve this, in a way that doesn't involve changing my media server (MM media server for NAS is in its infancy so not viable).

Any ideas? Has anyone else achieved this somehow?

[Lowlander]

With needs that specific I'd use the MediaMonkey Media Server as it has the AutoPlaylists already.

The alternative is MediaMonkey 4 and using the Export/Create Playlists 4 Child Nodes Addon which can auto-export Playlists and has config settings on how to configure the Playlists.

[ed.j]

With needs that specific I'd use the MediaMonkey Media Server as it has the AutoPlaylists already.

The alternative is MediaMonkey 4 and using the Export/Create Playlists 4 Child Nodes Addon which can auto-export Playlists and has config settings on how to configure the Playlists.

Thanks Lowlander. MM Server not viable because MM is on a laptop and therefore off half the time. It's the NAS that is on 24/7.

Going back to MM4 for this one thing is a bit mad.

i think expected behaviour for editing imported playlists is that the original playlist files would be edited also. As is the case with any other file in the MM library - why should it be different for a playlist? Maybe that can be considered.

There must be plenty of people who store music on a NAS and have the desire to sync playlists across devices/platforms.

[ed.j]

I have also since discovered that m3u playlists that use \ as a directory break rather than / will not work in a Linux environment, because in Linux a \ can be part of a file name. My media server is on Linux. It seems like the gods are conspiring against me!!