Playlist from Active Tracks

[kweller]

I have ~6900 tracks active from a database of about 10k tracks. What's the quickest and easiest way of selecting all active tracks to create a playlist from them?

Thanks.

Kevin

[Spoon]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Highlight missing tracks, then sort on the icon, select others >> right click >> add to playlist?

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

The non-active tracks aren't active because they don't satisfy the current selection criteria not because they're missing.

Kevin

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

I'm not sure I understand what you want to do.
Are you wanting to create a single playlist just using your 6900 active MMC files?
Are you wanting to create one or more playlists using just some of your 6900 active MMC files?
Or what?

In MMC, if you want to create random playlists of a given size (based on minutes of playing time or based on # of tracks), click on the Collection button, click on "Random Selector", set your parameters and click on OK. Random Selector restricts itself to only the files that are active within MMC. The randomly selected playlist files will be highlighted and grouped at the top of the MMC display. Then rightclick on one of these selected files, select advanced, and select Create Playlist from Selected Tracks.

If you are talking about creating a single playlist of all 6900 active tracks, I would think it might make more sense to create a separate MMC using just those tracks. Since dAP is pretty much the only player I use, this is much more manageable than dealing with a single very long playlist. I am also unsure whether dAP and MMC can create a playlist of that size.

Anyway, if these few tips are not helpful, perhaps you might provide some extra explanation of what you are trying to accomplish.

Best wishes,
Bill

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Thanks for the response.

> Are you wanting to create a single playlist just using your 6900 active MMC
> files?

That's it exactly.

> I would think it might make more sense to create a separate MMC using just
> those tracks

That won't work for what I'm doing unfortunately.

> I am also unsure whether dAP and MMC can create a playlist of that size.

It can, it's just a bit laborious getting them all selected and creating the playlist takes a while even on this dual Xeon machine!

Kevin

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Well I did confirm I could create a 972 track playlist (I asked for 1000 but apparently not all of the apparently active files in MMC met the appropriate criteria).

Assuming that track order does not matter, you could use the process I described.
If track order does matter, I suspect it might be advantageous to create a separate MMC using just your 6900 active tracks, get them in whatever order you want, then select them all and create your playlist that way.

If your selections or deletions from your active files in MMC are based on genre, or format, or artist, you can arrange for MMC to group all files within MMC based on any one of those criteria (but only one) by clicking on the header for that category. This might expedite your selection process.

Best wishes,
Bill

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

One additional tip, you can also open MMC, click on Preferences and readjust the sequence for arranging files within MMC to achieve a multi-factor sorting of your display which may further expedite your task.

Best wishes,
Bill

[donny]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

I think sorting icons makes sence, because not-active tracks have a minus(-) on the icon, but the problem is that "new" and user highlight states and media types also influence the sort, so this should help a bit but not all the way...

too bad you can't paste to the playlist window (being that you can copy in mmc).
I could suggest using some other player as a playlist editor? maybe it could merge a few playlist you create by partially selecting the items you need? I used winamp for advanced playlist editing for a while... now I don't use playlists almost at all...

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

I'm back from holiday now so not in such a rush and can explain what I was trying to do as there may be a better way as I realise I'm (ab)using features of dAP to do something they weren't intended for.

There are about 9.8k MP3s in MMC which I use to play music at home. I have a 60Gb Creative Zen that I use for listening to music on the move that will only take a subset of the music. To tag the music I want on the Zen I have added a 'zZen' genre to the MMC database and have added this genre to each track I want on the Zen, i.e. if there is a piece of music that is Rock the MMC genres for that track will be rock and zZen. It starts with z as MMC only writes the first genre to the MP3 tag so will correctly put rock, pop, whatever in the file tag.

When I want to transfer music to the Zen I create a playlist from all tracks that have the zZen genre then feed the playlist to Creative Playcenter which transfers all the tracks to my Zen (I have never managed to get Sveta to connect correctly to my Zen). I then set up selection criteria that includes the zZen genre and is indeterminate for everything else - all zZen tracks are now active and everything that doesn't have the zZen genre is inactive.

That's nice and simple except I haven't found it easy to sort the selected tracks so all tracks that have the zZen genre are together and easily selected for adding to a playlist. Donny, for some strange reason my dAP doesn't have the '-' icon for non-active tracks as I'm sure that's what I used to do (I don't transfer tracks very often). I've tried uninstalling all Illustrate programs, deleting the Illustrate directory structure and reinstalling but it made no difference (it also made no difference to the fact that I can't get the default skin amp to appear so I guess there are settings somewhere other than the directory that aren't deleted via uninstal).

To further complicate matters I do something similar for the 40Gb NJB3 (zNJB3) and the 4Gb iPOD (ziPOD).

Does that explanation make sense? Is there an easier way?

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

If your zZen genre is the only genre attached to these files you can grop them very easily in MMC.
Open MMC. On the frame of the display window which displays all your tracks and track info click on the column header that reads Genre. All tracks will get sorted by genre and the zZen tracks should be somewhere near the bottom. If you click on genre again the files in MMC will still be sorted by genre and arranged in reverse alphabetical order of genre (so zZen would be near the top). This would be the absolute easiest way but it will not work if you these tracks have multiple genres such as blues and zZen and rock and zZen. It will work best if you are only working with a single other genre at a time. Say you have blues, rock and classical files which are assigned those genres as well as zZen, but you are only going to work with the rock zZen files. These will still be sorted together arranged as "rock; zZen" behind (or before you have arranged genre in reverse alphabetical order) all the tracks simple with the "rock" genre. If you are transferring multiple zZen genres then this approach might still make things easier for you as the classical and zZen tracks will be together, the blues and zZen tracks will be together, etc.

Are you saying that if you open MMC and click on the selective play button and open to Genre, that you don't see a button for "Exclude All"? If that button is there, you could exclude all genres and then put a + sign for the zZen genre. That would enable you to highlight the zZen tracks. Then you could click on Selected Tracks on your MMC window, click on advanced and select Create Playlist from Selected Tracks. Perhaps assigning these tracks a User Highlight state might be of some help, but I have not made use of this feature and I am still a bit hazy on its potential.

Hope this helps.
Best wishes,
Bill

[LtData]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

When you uninstall dAP, I believe a registry folder remains that holds all of your settings for dAP so that you can reinstall but not have to reconfigure it. However, this leads to an uninstall not solving your queueing problem. See here for complete uninstall instructions: http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=6828

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

LtData-
Do you mean that the dAP reset routine described here: http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=403
might still leave some dAP registry problems untouched?
I hadn't realized that!

Best wishes,
Bill

[LtData]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Well the dAP reset routine isn't part of the normal uninstall, now is it? :D
But no, the dAP reset should wipe out all of the registry entries regarding dAP.

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

OK. I see now where that was coming from-

I've tried uninstalling all Illustrate programs, deleting the Illustrate directory structure and reinstalling but it made no difference (it also made no difference to the fact that I can't get the default skin amp to appear so I guess there are settings somewhere other than the directory that aren't deleted via uninstal).

-Kweller
I'm afraid that reference had gotten past me on the first go-round.

Best wishes,
Bill

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

If your zZen genre is the only genre attached to these files you can grop them very easily in MMC.

Hi Bill,

The zZen genre is always in addition to the correct genre for the track. Some of these tracks can have lots of genres as they can be tagged for all of the Zen, NJB3 and iPOD as well as being tagged with a zBL (to indicate bad language so excluded when children or aged people are around!) or zParty to say this should be played when we're having a party.

As I said, I'm somewhat abusing what genre is intended for but it works and I can't see another way of doing it within dAP. Tag&Rename will allow me to put these attributes in other parts of an MP3 tag and it's quite easy to then create a playlist using T&R from those containing the relevant tracks but I can't persuade myself at the moment that I want to do this manually for 7k+ tracks.

Kevin