Hmmm, this looks like a "how long is a piece of string?" question. Even if I could get a list of "all songs not in this playlist", for most of my playlists it would be too large to be of any use!
However, I think I can see what you're getting at. We're fond of making playlists of the form "Best Of 2008" (etc.) The problem is that when we add new albums from 2008, it can take a while to decide which tracks deserve to be added; and by the time we get round to it, we can't really remember which albums need to be considered. So it would be useful to me to have an easy way to get the set of songs that have been added since I last updated a particular playlist; though I'd want to be able to narrow / filter the set in umpteen ways too. However, something based purely on file modification times might not be reliable, for example if I'd changed a song's tags and forgotten to stop the tagger from changing the mod time, or if I make other changes to the playlist. Depending on what you really need, there may be other ways to achieve what you want; for example, some of Erland's plugins: Dynamic Playlist, Track Stat, Custom Browse, Custom Scan. With a teensy bit more discipline than I ever actually have, I could define "Best of 2008" as "tracks with Year = 2008 and rating >= 4"; but it would take me ages to do all the ratings retrospectively, and I'd keep forgetting to rate new tracks as I go along. (Of course, it's also possible to have a track's rating auto-adjusted according to how often it's played, or skipped...) That won't help with playlists such as "sunny day music"! Perhaps this is where adding custom tags might come in handy, or (more lazily) I could just add "sunny" as a genre (though this isn't something I'd choose to do, personally). I only use iTunes to manage my iPod's content (and do my utmost to keep it away from my precious main library!) but I do more with ratings and SmartPlaylists in it. A key feature is that it's easy to select multiple tracks and rate them all at once (if there's a way to do that for TrackStat, I'd love to know...) I also like it that iTunes will warn me if I try to add the same track twice to a playlist (and give me a choice), so then I can try to add stuff that may or may not be in there already and not worry about duplicates. This reminds me of another approach to the problem, because it's one place where iTunes is frustrating: if I'm looking at tracks in the library, to tell which playlists they're in, I have to right-click on each track in turn, and then look at a submenu. This is a real pain when I decide to replace albums on the iPod (a better rip, or a remaster), and need to know which playlists each track will have to be added to again. Notmad (for Creative players) and Anapod (for iPods) have a "playlist index", which has one row per track, listing all the playlists to which that track belongs; but I've never seen anything similar in PC-based library tools, nor for the SC DB. For my particular purposes, it would be useful to be able to select an album (more generally, some set of tracks), and to be told either in which playlists each track appears, or whether or not they appear in a chosen playlist. To then be able to add (a subset of) them to the (or a) playlist would be a boon. I haven't found anything yet that supports this. Just about every library tool I've tried has the problem that you can look at either the whole library, or at the content of one playlist, but not both at the same time. (foobar2000 is an honourable exception. I'd better not get started on iTunes' failings...) For maintaining my m3u playlists at a mundane level, I tend to use several tools. I use MediaMonkey to look at the playlists, because it quickly shows me any "dead" entries (e.g. when I've replaced an old mp3 rip with a flac). I've never liked MM for editing playlists (can't remember why now, but suspect it was just too fiddly), so for simple changes (replacing .mp3 with .flac etc.) I just use a text editor (PSPad). When the changes are too fiddly, I open the playlist in foobar2000 and drag/drop the new files in. (Last time I checked, foobar simply doesn't show "dead" entries, and removes them from .m3u files when it writes the changes back; so it's *vital* either to keep a backup or to ensure that all "dead" entries have been dealt with first; this is why I use MM as a first pass.) But that's only "low-level" maintenance. Working out what I want to put in each playlist is the hard bit :-) -- Brian -- Brian Ritchie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brian Ritchie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=62396 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
