Playlist from Active Tracks

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Well the dAP reset routine isn't part of the normal uninstall, now is it?

Well the good news is that running that has recovered the amp display. The bad news is that when I now try to run MMC I get a message saying 'There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk in the drive'. It's kind enough to give me three options - cancel, ignore and retry - but clicking any of them just results in the same message being displayed. I've no idea which drive it is talking about (all drives have disks in anyway including the CD drive) and looking at the Illustrate registry entry doesn't give me a clue.

Edit: [Later] An uninstall plus deleting the folder and registry branch followed by a reinstall seems to have solved all problems...but still no 'minus' icon for inactive tracks.

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Then I would think that using the Select Play feature of MMC to select only those tracks with the genre you wish (it shouldn't get confused about multiple genre types, but I might be mistaken) would be the way to go.

The random select function I described earlier might well be the preferable way to then transfer to playlist, although maybe there's some way you could simply export your tracks directly to the Creative Playcenter, but I am unfamiliar with this.

Best wishes,
Bill

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Hi Bill,

Then I would think that using the Select Play feature of MMC to select only those tracks with the genre you wish...[snip]...The random select function I described earlier might well be the preferable way to then transfer to playlist...[snip]

I'm already using the selective play feature as previously highlighted and, having now tried the random play function to select all qualifying tracks I'm seeing the same idiosyncratic behaviour I think you described.

Selective play for zZen tracks leaves 7532 tracks active. Telling random play to select 7532 tracks only selects 6903. As random play is supposed to select using the current selective play criteria I don't understand why there is a discrepancy - a bug?

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

As random play is supposed to select using the current selective play criteria I don't understand why there is a discrepancy - a bug?

Sure looks like a bug to me. What seems to happen is that certain tracks in the selected genre get cast out in the sense that they do not get included in the playlist and instead get scattered at different locations in MMC (although those missing tracks seem to get grouped together by source). Although the same tracks seem to get excluded from the playlist, there do appear to be discrepancies in terms of the number of files excluded (which seems to be a function of how many tracks I ask Random Selector to select-I've tried asking for far more tracks than are available in the selected genre and get somewhat more tracks included but by no means all). I do not see any clear pattern in terms of which tracks get excluded (some are Flac, some are mpc, other tracks from the same album are included).

Best wishes,
Bill

[Spoon]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

The Random selector was not designed for uch large track numbers, basically it tries 50-100 randomly to get a track, and if it cannot then that track is skipped.

[xoas]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

So it looks like the options for Kevin would be:

1. Use the selective play feature within MMC to make all genres indeterminate except for the zZen genre (which would be active), which would highlight the zZen files which could be arranged in little pockets by genre specifications and copy these to a playlist;

2. Select out the zZen files and use tag editor to rename the genre from zZen to 0zZen (maybe _zZen would work), so that the zZen genre would then be the first genre listed and you could group them in MMC all together by genre (although you might have to reverse the genre tag name once the tags are in the playlist, since you do not want zZen to be the primary genre); or,

3. You try to find some type of tag editing program that would allow you to sort out all of the tracks tagged with the zZen genre despite (and while maintaining) all other genre attributions and allow you to create a playlist or library out of these tracks. I do not know if such a program exists. If users would care to suggest a program Kevin might try, we would be happy to hear about it. I did a little research on this this morning, vry briefly, and I have renewed respect for the power of the tag editing features available through dMC/dAP/Power Pack.

Or, perhaps, another user has a suggestion for accomplishing this task within dAP and/or dMC. If you could somehow use a multiple genre listing as part of a filename, for example, then you might be able to use Windows to sort out all of your zZen files into a single artificial group. I'm not at all sure this can be done with dAP/dMC or not, or whether another program might be able to accomplish this.

Further suggestions would be welcomed.

Best wishes,
Bill

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

I'm thinking of a different tack. Tag&Rename will allow me to select all tracks that contain, say, Zen or iPOD, in the comment field and I can create the playlist from that. Anyone got any nifty ideas for getting the genre data from MMC into the comment field of the ID3 tag?

[kweller]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

In case anyone is interested I now have a workaround.

1. Export MMC to text file. My export field list was [artist][tab][album][tab][track number][tab][title][tab][genre][tab][filename][ret]. For some reason if I don't end the export field list with [ret] there is no line break at the end of each entry, if I put the [ret] in I get 2 line breaks.
2. Because of the above problem, load text file up into word and replace all double line breaks with a single.
3. Save file as text.
4. Load file into Excel as a text delimitted file. Filter genre colum so it only includes genre containing 'Zen' (or whatever).
5. Copy that column to a new worksheet then save it as a text file.
6. Rename text file so it has an m3u extension.

Job done. Easy isn't it :rolleyes:

Although that seems somewhat lengthy, even ignoring the fact that I can't group the correct MMC entries together in dAP, it is much much quicker that asking dAP to create a playlist of that size.

Anyone know why leaving [ret] out gives no line break and putting it in gives 2?

[Spoon]

Re: Playlist from Active Tracks

Could be a bug, will note it.