Planetarion Forums

meglamaniac · 3 Jan 2006, 16:49

Here's the thing.
I have a playlist. I made it in Winamp but it's saved as M3U so it opens in media player/whatever else as well. It's quite a large playlist. In fact it's 2 and a half hours long.

What I want to do is somehow copy all the songs on the playlist into one folder. Unfortunately, all the songs on the playlist are in pretty much random folders at the moment as I just went round adding individual tracks from albums.

How can I do this without manually finding 37 individual MP3s?

Ideas on a postcard.
Ta!

Dante Hicks · 3 Jan 2006, 16:53

Horrible Kludge #1 : Doesn't Winamp allow you to output to file[s] rather than your soundcard, if so desired? I seem to remember being able to output to at least .WAV files, although I've no idea if it allows you to "convert" mp3 to mp3...

Horrible Kludge #2 : Write a script to do it in something like Perl.

The Real Arfy · 3 Jan 2006, 17:24

Use RealOnePlayer to play said playlist and select all the files. Right click and select Change file names. I seem to remember it being quite hard to find the installer for this, I might even scour my PC for you.

Phil^ · 3 Jan 2006, 17:41

open the m3u file in notepad, its plain text and tells you precisely where each track is

The Real Arfy · 3 Jan 2006, 17:47

This still requires effort in moving the files though

Dante Hicks · 3 Jan 2006, 18:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil^

open the m3u file in notepad, its plain text and tells you precisely where each track is

I'd imagine Megla knows that bit...

However, you could easily use a text editor to add in "copy" at the beginning and "c:\temp\" at the end and run it as a batch file. Lots of text editors have macros in them which makes these sorts of tasks easy.

meglamaniac · 3 Jan 2006, 18:51

I was already musing over just making a copy of the playlist file then cut/paste/adding bits til it would run as a batch file. As no-one seems to know any programs to do it, that's probably what I'll end up doing.

JamMak · 4 Jan 2006, 04:09

37 mp3's?

1-X · 4 Jan 2006, 04:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamMak

37 mp3's?

thanks, I'm not the only one thinking that...

Surely it's far quicker to just manually copy them than to 'fanny about' trying to automate it

JamMak · 4 Jan 2006, 04:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1-X

thanks, I'm not the only one thinking that...

Surely it's far quicker to just manually copy them than to 'fanny about' trying to automate it

Well I am guessing that unless they are reaaaaaaaaaally long tracks, that might be a typo.

Quote:

Originally Posted by meglamaniac

it's 2 and a half hours long

1-X · 4 Jan 2006, 04:33

37 mp3s matches quite well with the 2½ hours length he mentioned though.

JamMak · 4 Jan 2006, 04:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1-X

37 mp3s matches quite well with the 2½ hours length he mentioned though.

So it does.
Was too lazy to do the maths.

Dante Hicks · 4 Jan 2006, 08:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1-X

Surely it's far quicker to just manually copy them than to 'fanny about' trying to automate it

Probably, but then if you have a similar issue next time with a thousand MP3s you'll be back to where you started. If you think of a nice elegant solution which can be applied generally then you don't have that worry.

Also, isn't is more intellectually satisfying to solve something in a vaguely clever manner than doing it by hand?

meglamaniac · 4 Jan 2006, 14:05

I know it didn't seem like much (I did a batch file in the end) but they were also in 37 different folders inside my albums folder which in turn has a folder per artist and folders within that per album - so that would have been a hell of a lot of clicking