File Management, m3u - Suggestions

[kiteandcamera]

I'm a little behind the curve. I need some input on the pros and cons of different methods of categorizing music on an mp3 player. What system of music management works for you? In other words, how do I make some sense out of 20GB of songs on a little device and easily find what I want to play? By album, by artist, by tags?? Perhaps a website with a tutorial for the mp3 challenged?

Also, can someone point me to a website that explains the various audio formats and an explanation of how to create playlists? Any input that can get me up to speed would be appreciated.

[Drunkard]

If your talking about a M3U/PLS playlist file (http://www.scvi.net/pls.htm), the file format is quite simple really, since it's just a text file that you could create and edit yourself with any simple text editor.

Heres a sample M3U file:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:233,Everclear - So Much For The Afterglow
Alternative\everclear - SMFTA.mp3
#EXTINF:227,Weird Al - Everything You Know Is Wrong
Comedy\Weird Al - Everything You Know Is Wrong.mp3
#EXTINF:187,Weird Al Yankovic - This is the Life
Weird Al - This Is The Life.mp3
#EXTINF:129,Weird Al: Bad Hair Day - Gump
http://www.site.com/~user/gump.mp3
#EXTINF:-1,My Cool Stream
http://www.site.com:8000/listen.pls


As you can see in that file, the first line specifies that this is an extended M3U file to a media player which then look at the foloowing lines, two at a time, each pair of lines comprising a single entry in the playlist. The first line of an entry is an identifier "#EXTINF:" followed by the track length in seconds, and then the track title. The second line is the location and filename of the file. This is where the playlist file can be somwehat limited, in that if you specify a specific location and then move the referenced media file later on, then that playlist entry will be broken, though the playlist file will still probably work, and the rest of the entries won't be affected, but this is a limitation of the format. And as you can see from the example above, a URL on the internet, or a local location on your PC can interchangably be used for the location.

Now, creating and editing these files could be very tiresome, especially if you have a lot of music files in you library. Fortunately, there are plenty of programs that can help you categorize and manage your music/video files, including the ID3 tag info often stored inside audio (MP3) files themselves for the artist and track titles, etc, and that info can often even be automatically downloaded and updated from the web. If your a Windows user, then Microsofts Windows Media Player is not too bad at doing these things, or perhaps the venerable Winamp might be more your style, either isn't a bad start.

Whatever you do, you want to have your data be as portable as possible, so you have to steer clear of proprietary formats as much as you can. This means don't use WMA, or really anything specific to windows. Use formats that will work on many systems, since no format will work on every system expect perhaps MP3, which is kinda ubiquitous these days.

Sory for the novel-length post, but I'm an audio engineer, and this stuff is kinda burned in my brain, I could probably write a book about it.

Good luck with it!

[daver]

kiteandcamera, i'm assuming you're trying to figure out how to organize your music on your X5?

it seems like a huge pain at first, but if you want to organize by artist, you'll have to create a folder in the "MUSIC" folder with the artist name. for example, i put all my Pennywise music in the /MUSC/Pennywise/album name folder, and likewise for all other albums/artists. and if you don't want to be picky, you can just play the entire MUSIC folder.

remember, that if you do decide to create M3U playlists, you'll need to select the music files directly from the X5's hard drive. you can't create the playlist with MP3s from your computer's hard drive, and then copy over the MP3s and playlist to the X5's drive. otherwise the X5 won't be able to find the songs you've playlist-ed.