Well, I've downloaded listFix() and had a go with it, and it does indeed
do a fine job!
The timing couldn't be worse - just last night I decided to give my
playlists a spring-clean, and went through fixing them by hand! So I'd
only a few playlists left to try listFix() on - mainly ones I was
thinking of ditching anyway, usually because they required too many
fiddly changes.
I'm very impressed at the matching capability. Not only did it find
obvious flac-for-wma matches, but it coped with albums moved to
different hard drives; and it even helped fix a list after I'd selected
tracks from one Smiths compilation at the expense of another.
All inexact matches have to be done one line at a time, so if "all"
I've done is to replace .wma tracks with .flacs, it'd be faster to edit
each playlist in a text editor; but then I'd still be tripped up by
spelling and formatting changes, which wouldn't faze listFix(). (I did
find a couple of anomalies, though, see below.)
Some more detailed notes made as I went along (pasted from text editor,
which has kept the linebreaks but not the indentation):
- I didn't realise at first that you have to define the Media
Library(-ies) (and not just the playlist folder) before it will
really look for matches - just thought it wasn't doing a good job!
- More details of matches (e.g. artist, album or just path)
would help disambiguate - filename alone isn't always enough.
(Both Dodgy and Leaves have albums with track 06 - Good Enough!)
- It was foxed by "11 - Faraway.wma" (and even "11 - Faraway.flac")
when
the new file (in the same folder) was called "11 - Far Away.flac"
- when I switched playlists without saving, it didn't warn me that my
changes
wouldn't be saved (or ask me to confirm that I wanted to lose
them)
- one track at a time for a long album is a bit tedious, but I can
imagine a "find matching album" would be much more tricky!
- is coping well with my Bach playlists, which were messed-up by
"imaginative" encodings of "funny" characters (e.g. e-acute in
"Bouree")
- However: after I'd made these changes, I spotted that SlimServer
was
reading the original playlist OK! So I'd like to save my changes
as a
different playlist... phew! can do this. But will see whether or
not
the changes made by listFix() are compatible with SC... (as far as
I can tell, they are).
- details at bottom ("Number of lost entries" etc.) too pale - hard
to read,
and I didn't realise they were there at first!
- impressive: "06 - Revolution.wma" - first match was correct:
"06 - Revolution (in the Summertime).flac" !
- "12 - You.wma": "12 - You.flac" was on 2nd page of matches;
algorithm seems
to prefer longer versions of short titles, e.g. "You Got It Bad".
I found that sometimes it took a couple of clicks to get the
right-mouse menu to appear over a selected item. Also, since
right-mouse in the tracks list is greyed-out when no track is selected,
it might be nice if instead it also selected the track under the mouse
(saves having to left-click to select it first)?
I haven't tried it, but it's not clear whether a list that's been
sorted (say to put all Not Found tracks in one place) will then be
saved in the new order; if so, then it would be good to be able to go
back to the original playlist order.
It'd be lovely to be able to select all the tracks in an album that's
moved, and to have listFix() find and update them all at once; but I
can imagine that would be a nightmare working that in with the
approximate string matching! (In one place, I decided it would be
easier just to drag/drop the new albums into the playlist in an editor
that supports that (such as foobar2k)). It'd be good to be able to
apply changes to multiple playlists as well.
But that's just being greedy! listFix() already looks like it'll be
pretty useful. It really has rescued some playlists that I was about
to abandon, or rebuild from scratch. If only I'd found it yesterday!
:-)
-- 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=42597
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