Bugzilla – Bug 2369
intelligent path handling in playlists
Last modified: 2009-07-30 14:02:12 UTC
It'd really be great if SlimServer had an intelligent playlist interpretation feature that could handle different paths. Many people store all their music on NAS boxes and may run SlimServer on those boxes, but run iTunes on multiple different computers, etc. Those people (namely me) would like to be able to easily export playlists from iTunes and use them on our players. Just for clarification, I have a bunch of music files organized how I want them on a NAS machine which I've put SlimServer on. My iTunes instances access this repository over the network and are set to leave the music files alone. I keep my playlists in iTunes because it's very easy to manage them there. If one could export playlists in XML from iTunes and have SlimServer automagically Just Work with them, that'd be great. This would entail either translating iTunes .xml files to .m3u, or adding support for them in SlimServer so they're recognized as playlists. About the path handling: let's say all music is stored in the following directory on a NAS box that is also running slimserver: /shares/media/music/ Which contains subfolders like /shares/media/music/classic rock and oldies/singles Now let's say one exports a playlist from iTunes on a Windows machine with a network-mounted drive that sees this path as X:\media\music\classic rock and oldies\singles It'd be REALLY sweet if SlimServer could not only handle the iTunes exported playlist, but figure that path discrepancy out by itself.
I would add that there could be a server setting which would allow you to enter the specific "search and replace" text to translate playlists. For example, any time the playlist contains "y:\music\", let the server translate that to "/mnt/hdc1/music/". Just have an option for the user to specify those path parameters. This would allow all kinds of different software to create playlists that slimserver could use.
I want to bump this bug because, despite new support for iTunes, it appears that path translation is still not always working. Please see http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49532 There is still no manual setting for path translation and SqueezeCenter's automatic implementation is either missing or broken as of 7.0.1 -- likely the latter as it does manage to find 8 of the 3500 files in my iTunes Library.xml file. In my iTunes Library, files are currently under /Volumes/media/music, but from the machine SqueezeCenter runs on, they would be found in /shares/media/music, but it's not making the translation. I'm changing this from 'enhancement' to 'normal' since, with the introduction of official iTunes Library support, this now qualifies as a bona fide bug.
Changing component to iTunes.