Export a Playlist as a text or CSV file

I realised last night that if you want to create a ‘published playlist’ (for example, to put on your station’s Web site as a list of ‘here are the tracks we played on this show’), the only (?) way to do this currently would be to extract from a text playout log file and then do some manual work to extract the titles and artists. :frowning:

This seems an obvious gap in the feature set of the current version of mAirList. :slight_smile:

Therefore, would it be easy (or not) to allow the CURRENT Playlist to be exported as a text or CSV file, to simplify that job? The idea being that you would prepare your Playlist on a mAirList ‘admin.’ PC, then export that Playlist as text/CSV containing (at least) title and artist(s) so that your station’s webmaster could easily add it to your site as a track listing for your show. 8)

What do you all (especially Torben!) think of this idea?

BFN
CAD

mAirList 3.1 can save playlists as HTML (offered as an additional file format in the Save Playlist dialog). And writing a script that exports the current playlist into some custom CSV or text format is a very simple task.

Ah: yes, of course! Good points. :slight_smile:

BFN
CAD

so that your station's webmaster could easily add it to your site as a track listing

Mmmm, not very handy.
As Torben said, it’s better that you code a script which generates a file (directly in HTML format, or CSV, or what you want to), and directly, in the script, you call a php script for uploading in real-time the file you’d just generated !!
Like that, your next or previous songs are always up-to-date in your website, in real-time !!! Really easy to do and so much better than uploading the whole playlist once a day (not very serious if you change some songs a few minutes before playing them…).

Isn’t it ?

I’ve got some snippets of PHP code that will write to MySQL the details of a log file (ie: any song properties you throw at it) and time-stamp it so that website visitors can visit your playlist page, and, along the lines of “I heard a song, but don’t know what it was called” and then can select the Day, and 00,15,30,45 minutes from drop-down boxes and get a dump of songs played during that time period.

I’ll dig it out and post it if there’s a need for it.

Thanks for those thoughts, but both Theo and Charlie are assuming WAY too much organisation …

… which is something our organisation (currently) doesn’t have. >:( No way to auto-update Web pages. In fact, no Web site other than the ‘prototype’ we put up over 6 months ago, which has been updated, oh, maybe 6 times here and there since; but nothing significant has changed. And absolutely DEFINITELY NO database on the site (or if there is, I’m not aware of it).

Manually uploading a list by editing a page would be about the limit of our available technology right now; but I agree, you could write a script or an Excel macro or something that could process that … so: case closed. :slight_smile: And no, I have neither the time nor the will to sort that out.

BFN
CAD

Sounds like somebody needs that free auto-FTP util I mentioned here ages ago :slight_smile: Create the file, AutoFTP does the rest (using “watch folders” on your PC).

The above ideas do sound better than what I’ve been doing. :slight_smile:

A while ago we needed to print some playlists for an outside broadcast, and I found creating a CSS stylesheet for the .mlp file provided some nice, formatted styles, although haven’t worked out how to automate applying the CSS import.

Using various snippets here (mainly from Charlie I think!) we do a HTTPGet request which sends the information to a PHP script on the website, which writes to a MySQL database.

Our logging is to an internal MySQL database, and I have wondered about setting up a script to query everything played in a given period and generate it with the HTML tags, ready to paste in.

Displaying what has been played is best achieved through the various logging mechanisms provided by mAirList. The advantage is that you get the actual play/start time then, rather than the estimated time from the playlist.

Displaying what you are going to play involves exporting the playlist in some way, and this is what this thread is about, I believe.

By the way, the latter is not allowed in Germany, so I have no experience with this task and cannot propose a dead simple solution.

By the way, the latter is not allowed in Germany

Seriously ??
Oh…

Yes. I don’t know the exact rules, but I think you may only mention two or three tracks ahead. It’s to keep people from waiting for a particular song and recording it (sic!).

Oh yes…
In france, when you broadcast on Internet and display title on the player (winamp and so on…), you have to display, at regular interval, a message every xx seconds for preventing software from ripping the songs using the change of the title…

We have this in the UK, too. For online broadcasters (the licensing of which has provided many forum threads of enjoyable bedtime reading) the wording is thus:

no advanced notification to the User of titles of specific tracks to be played or specific albums from which tracks will be played (other than the introduction of the next track in DJ led services)
There are lots of other (mostly daft) rules, but that's PRS for you!

Source: Limited online music licence (LOML)

Actually, Charlie, I was thinking more about a ‘what we played’ list similar to those available for most BBC Radio 2 shows.

But I’m afraid the Auto-FTP wouldn’t help because we don’t have the mechanism on the web site to handle it, nor do I even know who’s in charge of our site, much less how to change it myself even if I had access. Some horrible blog-software-based thingie I believe. YEEUGH! :’(

BFN
CAD

[quote=“Cad, post:14, topic:6764”]But I’m afraid the Auto-FTP wouldn’t help because we don’t have the mechanism on the web site to handle it, nor do I even know who’s in charge of our site, much less how to change it myself even if I had access. Some horrible blog-software-based thingie I believe. YEEUGH! :’(

BFN
CAD[/quote]
If you have a content management system you may still be able to include the uploaded file - if you edit the theme / template and use something like…

<?php include( '/justplayed.php' ); ?>

…it’ll include the file at a place you feel appropriate.

I think CMS are a necessary evil - a burden for the webmaster at times but they do make submitting articles/blogs and things simple for the (usually non-skilled) presenters especially as you don’t have to submit e-mails and text files to the webmaster and wait for them to paste it into a page etc.

Well, my personal view is that as a community radio station, we SHOULD be training/re-skilling the volunteers.

Therefore, I would prefer that we do a proper Web design and then use the W3C’s open source Amaya editor to put it together and maintain it. That way, we could re-skill (or just train) lots of people at least to the stage where they could put ‘basic Web page editing’ on their CV. To my mind, that would and should be something we are doing.

However, as I’ve said to others, that part of our station is controlled by others, and I don’t even know who exactly.

Maybe after our AGM, the Web site will be picked up on by the new Leith FM Board and dramatically improved. I sure hope so!

BFN
CAD

[quote=“Cad, post:14, topic:6764”]Actually, Charlie, I was thinking more about a ‘what we played’ list similar to those available for most BBC Radio 2 shows.

But I’m afraid the Auto-FTP wouldn’t help because we don’t have the mechanism on the web site to handle it, nor do I even know who’s in charge of our site, much less how to change it myself even if I had access. Some horrible blog-software-based thingie I believe. YEEUGH! :’(

BFN
CAD[/quote]

Hi Cad, have you tried an iframe holding which a page that automatically refreshes (meta refresh) perhaps every 60 seconds. Long enough for autoftp to upload the new web page to reflect changes.

I did have this working somewhere but darned if I can find it again now as sites continually change.

Kind Regards Tony

I will say this one last time: :slight_smile:

I do NOT have any access to our Web site and I do NOT know who has. Ditto I do not have any access to any of the office PCs (I’m kind of hands-off right now until the management situation is fully resolved; plus I have very VERY little spare time, and most of that is going into writing the UK English mAirList manual). Hence I literally cannot ‘try’ anything suggested here for the moment.

So, whilst I do appreciate all your thoughts and suggestions, I’m left grinding my teeth because there’s literally nothing I can do to change ANY content on our site right now; nor can I pass the ideas on to those who could (whomever they are). And anything suggested here would also have to wait until our entire site is fully overhauled.

Not meaing to sound ‘snippy,’ :slight_smile: but it’s just a hugely frustrating issue for me at the moment, which I can do nothing about for at least a month or two.

BFN
CAD