Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Make Playlist updated

https://sourceforge.net/projects/makeplaylist/

You can download the latest version of Make Playlist (which I abbreviate to "mplay") from Source Forge at the above link.

This is my 3rd update this year which addresses key issues that were bugging me.

For one thing, I've added in automatic reset for music files the way they play by default.  Folders for music albums do not reset automatically (that was a very bad idea, only released in 0.79 then quickly abandoned).  Instead, you must exhaust all the music files in folders you have listed, then mplay automatically resets all files just after the last one is read.

So there is no need for a separate "-reset" operation (unless you want to force one, like the old days, with the new option "-no_reset").

This required a suprisingly large rewrite.  I'd wanted this feature from the beginning, from 2021, but every time I tried to implement it I got bogged down.  A large code re-organization was needed (I added a new file, mplay_libs.tcl, which must be included where the other mplay programs are kept).  But I also kept the changes to as little as possible for now, which is how I was able to get it done.

For another, I found the mixing or blending algorithms in both splay and shufflelinks were not very good.  I had to rethink the entire blending process after discovering that the relative size of the files you are blending, which is not necessarily known in advance when running a script, is a key factor.  So I cam up with 3 parameters which allow a new blending algorithm to adapt to all possible relative size differences.

As always, even if you're only interested in music files, it's necessary to get ideas from all 3 scripts, MakeMusic, MakeVideos, and MakePix to see different techniques for creating playlists in action.  I make a fairly basic script for music playlists, because that's what I need and it's where most people would start, and a very complex one using tricks only a professional music programmer might need (such as mixing playlists) in MakeVideos.  mplay is, by design, capable of creating playlists for many kinds of media programs: any that either accept an .m3u playlist file, or that accept a simple folder of files (which is faked with a set of links to the actual files), and the tricks shown might be used in many music playlist creation scenarios.



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