2004-05-28, 05:14
guys, i'm willing to do whatever begging, groveling or bribing that is necessary to convince the powers that be that some sort of advanced playlist editor is essential to xmbc.
i have nearly 2,000 songs and i could take the time to put every song into a single folder for a genre and then create playlists off that but then that's highly limiting as many songs clearly belong to more than one genre. i've tried just editing a .m3u file but 2,000 songs, it'd take me days for each one and it's a tedious, boring task.
the following options seem feasible if someone is willing to tackle the task:
1) create a full-blown playlist editor within xbmc that has full association capabilities. the way i see this is as a menu item below the playlist menu item. when you choose playlist editor, you'd see a list of all songs along with any genres, styles or types the user has created along with a filter for each, including the very important, none so that you can easily filter down to just songs that aren't in any playlist and quickly get them into one or more.
this would allow you to highlight a song, hit a button and bring up a list of genres and so forth on the left and then select (move to the right) all those that apply. so song a could be in "classic rock, "easy listening", "happy mood", etc. it wouldn't be limited to just a single genre.
then while i'm in the playlist i could just select "happy" and get an instant shuffled (optional) playing of all my "happy" songs.
2) support use of the comments field. every audio format i've personally used supports a comment field and we could use this to type in the above genres and then have the playlist facility just read those through during a scan. then allow playlist to display a complete list of all current genres contained in all the songs. displaying the complete list would also help identify spelling errors as i would see both "rock" and "rokc" and when i chose "rokc" i'd quickly see which song it was i mis-typed "rock" on and correct it.
3) some sort of complex pc-based editor that can read your music files either locally or via ftp on the xbox and create .m3u files and ftp the resulting playlists to the xbox. this could offer a lot of power but then requires a pc link and lots of complexities that seem unnecessary.
the bottom line is that it's quickly becoming apparent that we need something for those of us with thousands of songs to manage.
i'd love to see this evolve to a point where i can match the feature set of radio station software i saw back in the mid-80's. in it you could do things like tell it, "for the next 20 songs, play classic rock of the 70's songs, then switch over and play male vocalists for 3 songs, then an upbeat song, then 3 girl group songs, then move up to 5 hard rock songs and finish off the evening with 5 easy listening songs."
for now i'd take anything that will help deal with this large task. as it is, i now hear rem, then enya and possibly bach and then a christmas tune. not very entertaining.... <grin>
i have nearly 2,000 songs and i could take the time to put every song into a single folder for a genre and then create playlists off that but then that's highly limiting as many songs clearly belong to more than one genre. i've tried just editing a .m3u file but 2,000 songs, it'd take me days for each one and it's a tedious, boring task.
the following options seem feasible if someone is willing to tackle the task:
1) create a full-blown playlist editor within xbmc that has full association capabilities. the way i see this is as a menu item below the playlist menu item. when you choose playlist editor, you'd see a list of all songs along with any genres, styles or types the user has created along with a filter for each, including the very important, none so that you can easily filter down to just songs that aren't in any playlist and quickly get them into one or more.
this would allow you to highlight a song, hit a button and bring up a list of genres and so forth on the left and then select (move to the right) all those that apply. so song a could be in "classic rock, "easy listening", "happy mood", etc. it wouldn't be limited to just a single genre.
then while i'm in the playlist i could just select "happy" and get an instant shuffled (optional) playing of all my "happy" songs.
2) support use of the comments field. every audio format i've personally used supports a comment field and we could use this to type in the above genres and then have the playlist facility just read those through during a scan. then allow playlist to display a complete list of all current genres contained in all the songs. displaying the complete list would also help identify spelling errors as i would see both "rock" and "rokc" and when i chose "rokc" i'd quickly see which song it was i mis-typed "rock" on and correct it.
3) some sort of complex pc-based editor that can read your music files either locally or via ftp on the xbox and create .m3u files and ftp the resulting playlists to the xbox. this could offer a lot of power but then requires a pc link and lots of complexities that seem unnecessary.
the bottom line is that it's quickly becoming apparent that we need something for those of us with thousands of songs to manage.
i'd love to see this evolve to a point where i can match the feature set of radio station software i saw back in the mid-80's. in it you could do things like tell it, "for the next 20 songs, play classic rock of the 70's songs, then switch over and play male vocalists for 3 songs, then an upbeat song, then 3 girl group songs, then move up to 5 hard rock songs and finish off the evening with 5 easy listening songs."
for now i'd take anything that will help deal with this large task. as it is, i now hear rem, then enya and possibly bach and then a christmas tune. not very entertaining.... <grin>
