What I am trying to do is take a playlist pulled up in excel, save it as a space delimited .prn/.txt for importing into SPL Creator, save as M3U so I could load/import into mAirlist. SPL Creator needs space delimited fields and 00-24 hour markers on each item for each hour it plays in. I need to do this conversion for 31 full day playlists. What I am hoping to find or learn if need be, some sort of macro that can take a template with the hour markers already in place or maybe even none at all depending on the best way to do the macro. The top of the hour always shows up in the title which is the second column, the first column being the hour markers. So maybe the macro could find each instance of it and increment up one each time it find it while marking everything that follows with the same hour marker until it reaches the next top of the hour title.
Maybe this is easier: Take the mp3 file names that are already listed in order for that field, separate that column into a new spreadsheet, add the directory location to each, export as a text file, and rename as .m3u. That would create a basic m3u with the order of mp3s played. My big question even with this route: how do you automate telling excel to add the directory location to each line? Maybe I dont even need the directory location since mAirlist already has all the files in the database and all I need is the names of the mp3s in order?
MAYBE…just MAYBE someone has a macro that either of these already?
Ok nevermind! I found a simple solution to what seemed like a gargantuan task lol. I totally skipped excel and pulled it into notepad++ and used its macro recording and just pasted the directory before each line. bamm. done. mAirlist pulls the whole days playlist up perfect. Man I love the drag n drop function! Two screens helps too.
One thing I did learn is that mAirlist does not like unicode text files converted to .m3u by just changing the extension. I exported just tabbed delimited text.
I had started using the db playlist scheduler but I didn’t realize that it could split a whole day up. Ill try that. That means I have to change the m3u titles to the date and time format its looking for to insert into the calendar, right?
You know, I fairly new to mAirList myself. I think you’ll find that the mAirListDB is very simple to use and comprehensive. You should give it a go, and I think you’ll find it quite nice and much easier to use than DRS…
Yes! That’s exactly what I am finding Alec. So much more power and flexibility compared to DRS. Im not trying to bash it but its time to move on to something else. Thats what I’m working on. With Torben amazingly making it work even better to transition right over, its just flippin great! I am in awe of the support here.
On the Playlist tab in mAirListDB, navigate to the FIRST hour slot you want to import into, then click Import, Multiple Playlists, and tell mAirListDB how you want to split up the imported playlist. (This will make more sense when you try it for yourself!) No M3U file renaming required, but I’m not sure whether anything within the M3U would need tweaking, 'cos I don’t have anything like DRS or SPC or Powergold available here to try out.
Sweet, yeah, I tried this out and it works great. The only thing that would be better is being able to split it up by artist. Where I want to tell it to split for each top of the hour sweeper. The TOP OF HOUR is actually in the artist field and not title in this case. I notice there is an “Exact title”. How is this different then just “Title”?
To be honest, I don’t know, partly because I don’t use external schedulers, therefore I don’t use that import function and freely confess that I’m not too familiar with it personally; so you’ll need to wait for Torben to answer that himself.
I would guess that Exact title means that you have to specify the full title, and in the correct case.
By that, I mean that TOP OF HOUR, Top Of Hour, and top of hour (for example) would all be considered different when mAirListDB splits the imported file up.
So, if your file contains TOP OF HOUR in its Title field, and you type in an Exact title of top of hour (or indeed, anything other than TOP OF THE HOUR), they wouldn’t be considered as a match, and the split wouldn’t happen.
I stress this is a guess, but it’s a fairly educated one. I’m sure Torben will pop in and tell us both if I’m horribly wrong. I also have no idea what the difference is between Title and Exact title. ???
Again, as an educated guess, all your TOP OF HOUR sweepers will have a scheduled time of “something o’clock”, i.e. nn:00:00, correct? I’m thinking that that is what Split input playlist by Fixed time split will achieve for you.
Sorry if this sounds a bit vague, but if your playlist does include a ‘scheduled time’ for each item, I think that would be the way for you to go.
PS: Presumably your top-of-hour-sweepers all have different titles, correct? If so, I can see why in your case, splitting by Artist would be the ideal; and perhaps Torben could add that as one of the options in the Split playlist by dropdown for you. Let us know.
Thanks, Torben. I thought it would be something like that.
Might be more obvious and easier to understand if you change the Title option to read Partial title; everyone would then realise that the option would match on a substring.
I’m sure Torben will pop in and tell us both if I’m horribly wrong. I also have no idea what the difference is between