A Smartass Education

Back in 1999 I made these cool mp3 cd’s that auto played when you put them in the drive.  I kept making a lot of cd’s so I didn’t want to make a new playlist every time I made a new cd, yet I needed the playlist to make all the music on the cd autoplay. 

Well it’s been a long time since then and I forgot how I made the auto generating m3u fie.  So I googled it, and I could not find anything on it.  I knew that I had done it in one short line when I made it.  Yet typing a path and  *.* or *.mp3 didn’t seem to work now.  It just loaded garbage in winamp.

Well I was annoyed and knew it could be done so I kept messing with it until I remembered how I did it.

To make an mp3 file for an entire directory you open up notepad and type . Ok in case you didn’t get that you open up notepad and type . (it’s a period).  That’s it.  Then you can double click that playlist and it will open up and play everything in your current directory.  Now if you are anal like me all your tracks are named 01 Track Name.mp3 02 Track Name.mp3 etc.. so they will all play in order too. 

Now I know what you are thinking, you want to play multiple directories, not just the current directory.  To do that you just need to type the path of the folder(s) you want to play, but be careful you DO NOT put a forward slash after the directory name (this is what was screwing me up before).

So lets say I have a folder called Tom Waits and inside that I have all his albums and I want to play all of his albums.  I open notepad and I can type a period and save it in the Tom Waits directory and it will play all the content in that folder.  Now lets say I only want the albums called Alice and Rain Dogs. 

Then I would type:
Rain Dogs
Alice

I would save this as an m3u file (Make sure you pull down the Save As Type thing below the file name and choose *.* so you don’t save it as playlist.m3u.txt)  and walah a playlist that plays both those albums and it does it with only one 2 lines. instead of 30+ lines to put the individual song paths in. 

Now I wanted a playlist that plays EVERYTHING in my EVERYTHING Else directory.  That was why I did this.  So I just opened notepad and made one line that said EVERYTHING Else and I saved it in my Mp3s directory.  By doing this I am able to make a playlist that even when I add new content it automatically adds that new content. 

I have seen all sorts of really complex scripts that the entire purpose is to recursively go through a directory and look for new stuff to add to an existing playlist.  All they had to do is type a path without the trailing forward slash and it’s a valid playlist file.

More Examples:
Lets assume there is a playlist file in my Mp3s directory called lovedalbums.m3u.  I right click on that file and I tell it to Open With > Notepad (browse if you don’t have that option and look in windows directory for notepad). 

Inside (F:\Mp3s\lovedalbums.m3u) it says:
EVERYTHING Else\Johnossi\2005 – Johnossi
EVERYTHING Else\Infected Mushroom\2007 – Vicious Delicious
EVERYTHING Else\Eve 6\2000 – Horrorscope
EVERYTHING Else\No Doubt\1995 – Beacon Street Collection
EVERYTHING Else\Less Than Jake\2008 – GNV FLA
EVERYTHING Else\Fastball\2004 – Keep Your Wig on
EVERYTHING Else\Eddie Vedder\2007 – Into the Wild
EVERYTHING Else\Ben Folds Five\1995 – Ben Folds Five
EVERYTHING Else\Beatles\2006 – Love
EVERYTHING Else\Amanda Palmer\2008 – Who Killed Amanda Palmer
EVERYTHING Else\Michael Lee Firkins\2007 – Blacklight Sonatas
Various Artists\Donnie Darko (Complete bootleg)
Various Artists\Elizabethtown
My Compilations\2004 – What’s Left of Me\Absolution 2.0
My Compilations\2004 – What’s Left of Me\Beautiful 2.0
My Compilations\2008\Haunt Me

Ok I probably didn’t have to put that many, but you should get the point now. 

Recap:  In Notepad type a period and save as playlist.m3u to add full directory.  To add individual ones add the paths without a trailing slash. 

Enjoy