Setting up MP3 playlists for multiple devices

FrankGrimes

I've got a Squeezebox Boom and a Duet device (which I both love!) and I have the Squeezecenter server running on my Windows Home Server to serve the music to the devices. I have over 10,000 tracks and I tagged them all and arranged the folder structure two years ago (I went with an approach I read on the web at the time- e.g. Music\A\ACDC\Highway to Hell folder structure). Lazily, I never got around to creating playlists so I'm really not getting the full use out of my library.

I'd now like to setup playlists so that I use more of my library on the Squeezebox devices, but I also want to copy some of my tracks to my HTC HD2 phone and also two Creative Zen MP3 players and I also want to setup various playlists that would work on all of those devices.

Basically, I'm not well up on how to setup playlists. I remote desktop into my WHS and use MP3Tag on it to do the tagging and folder restructing on there. It takes hours for it to load up when I point it at the root folder, so I generally just load up one folder (e.g. A) at a time, so it'd take forever to setup playlists. Is there a smarter way to do it (e.g. a program that will quickly load that large number of tracks)? Is there any way to make the playlists so that they'll work in Squeezecenter but also on the MP3 players when I copy the tracks and playlists across (e.g. relative references to file paths)?

Thanks for any tips to make this process a little less tedious so that I can finally get the most out of my collection that took so much to put together over the years!

JonathanAnon

Hi Frank,

I use mp3 backing tracks for when I'm gigging, and for creating "playlists" or a list of gig tracks I want to play in order, I do the following:

Create a folder, say Set List 2010. Copy all the tracks to this folder. I also normalise the tracks with MP3Gain to ensure that they have the same volume level but you may not need to do this....

Open Tagscanner http://www.xdlab.ru/en/ MP3 tagger. and navigate to the folder Set List 2010..... The interface will be populated by the names of the tracks.. Move to Tag Editor and do the following:
i) highlight all the tracks and tag them with the same Artist Name and same Album Name. nb make sure that you dont edit the track name, as only the aforementioned fields should be the same ..
ii) order the tracks in the order you wish to play them, then highlight them all and choose autonumber....

When you import these in to iTunes they will appear as the same album and in the order you selected.. I use an ipod and a creative Zen and by tagging and ordering this way, the lists appear the same on both..

There may be something in my method that you can use.. The autonumbering in Tagscanner is particularly handy.. I used to have to name the mp3 files as 01-trackname.mp3, 02-trackname.mp3 etc etc, and it saved me having to do that.

FrankGrimes

Thanks for that JonathanAnon. I'm looking into a few other programs (MediaMonkey, PlaylistCreator) to see if they can do it all in a more automated manner, but there may be some of your tips that can help, so thanks for that. Surprised there's not more info out there on the web on this as I'm sure plenty of people have similar needs and I'm sure there's a fully automated solution somewhere.

The PlaylistCreator here seems to allow absolute or relative path references - I'll play around with relative references and see if that gives me what I need. I'd like to avoid having to duplicate files (e.g. copy them into a separate folder to be uploaded onto the Zen) if possible but will see how it goes.