Auto playlists

[Invicta]

Hi

I am thinking of buying a Squeezebox Duet. One item I am not sure about is can this play Windows Media Player playlists, particularly auto play lists?

I have Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista and use auto play lists extensively. E.g. I can create a playlist by genre and star rating e.g. to play favorite jazz. I believe the auto play lists are a proprietary format.

Can the Duet read these Window Media play playlists or create its own equivalent playlists without me having to re-rate all the music tracks in the Squeeze software?

[MeSue]

You may be able to export the WMP auto playlists to a static file that SC can use, but of course they will lose the dynamic qualities.

You can get some of the same functionality with Erland's plug-ins for SC, such as:
Custom Scan, to bring your WMP ratings into SC's database
Trackstat, to show ratings and track play counts, etc.
SQL Playlist and Dynamic Playlist, to create similar auto playlists that SC can use and have them played dynamically.

I use J. River Media Center rather than WMP, but it has a smartlists function that is similar. The only real difficulty doing it this way is making rating changes when listening on my Squeezeboxes. If you're interested I'll explain more about how I manage that.

[Invicta]

Many thanks for your reply, and my apologies for my late response.

Windows Media Player does allow you to export a dynamic playlist to a "normal" playlist but it is a pain to do and as you point out it is nolonger dynamic.

With the Erland's plug-ins it sounds like it should be doable. Windows Media Player has the option to store the star ratings in the media file rather than the database so this may make it easier to do. I am not familiar with the Erland's plug-ins, are these a purchase or free add-on?

I do change the ratings and add new ones quite often in Windows Media Player so I would need to keep these in sync with SC. I would be interested to know how you do this with J. River Media Center.

Many thanks

[MeSue]

Erland's plugins are free (donate if you like them). You can learn about them from the wiki or in the plugins section of this forum.

I do all my ratings in the J. River program and the Custom Scan plugin integrates those ratings into Squeezecenter. When I am listening on the Squeezebox and come across a song for which I want to change the rating, I use another plugin--Playlist Manager by Philip Meyer--to add the song to either my "Rate Up" or "Rate Down" playlist. This doesn't change the rating, but later I can import those playlists into J. River Media Center and change the ratings there. Then the new ratings are written back to the tags, where the changes will get picked up in the next Squeezecenter scan. I do that about once a week or so, then clear those playlists and start fresh.

[wnshall]

Erland's plugins are free (donate if you like them). You can learn about them from the wiki or in the plugins section of this forum.

I do all my ratings in the J. River program and the Custom Scan plugin integrates those ratings into Squeezecenter. When I am listening on the Squeezebox and come across a song for which I want to change the rating, I use another plugin--Playlist Manager by Philip Meyer--to add the song to either my "Rate Up" or "Rate Down" playlist. This doesn't change the rating, but later I can import those playlists into J. River Media Center and change the ratings there. Then the new ratings are written back to the tags, where the changes will get picked up in the next Squeezecenter scan. I do that about once a week or so, then clear those playlists and start fresh.

Have you investigated using Trackstat? I guess it boils down to whether you can get J. River to import the rating info from Trackstat's export. Have you (or anyone else) tried? I've just started playing with J. River so I don't fully know what it can do with respect to import/export or how hard it would be to parse the trackstat export data.

[MeSue]

I use Trackstat, but I don't change ratings with trackstat because I don't know how to get the changed ratings back to my files. That's why I do the Playlist Manager workaround.