Hello,

I was just wondering if anyone was interested in creating a plugin to create Excel files based on a playlist. This would be really handy in creating a document with all the info in your playlist to share with a friend, print out, etc. When I burn an MP3 CD, I always throw on a current Excel document with a list of all the albums that I have, so I know where they all are [I've got about 110 CD's, so this can be a problem =]

I think that this plugin would be pretty straightforward to program. The user would choose an output pattern, based on the tags, and then the plugin would run through all the files and process them, spitting out an excel database containing all that info. For instance, a pattern like '%artist% - $num(%tracknumber%, 2) - %album%' would create a spreadsheet with three columns, and fill in info from all the separate files.

Also, having the ability to limit it to one entry per album [if you just want to keep track of albums, rather than all the tracks on each album] could be added.

Anyone out there willing to try their hand at this? I think that it would be pretty easy, but I don't know nearly enough about programming to attempt something like this =\ Thanks!

BO(V)BZ

Barring having a plugin written, this is what I would suggest trying:

In Foobar, change the "Copy Command" format under "Title formatting" to show the information you'd like, for example,

%artist% * %album% * %title%

Or whatever you'd like, where the * serves as a separator.

Then, using the context menu command "Copy name(s)", copy the above information from Foobar and paste it in an Excel document.

From here, select the cells that you just pasted into and use Data > "Text to Columns" (current as of Excel 2000) function and fiddle around with that a bit. The asterisks included above can be used, along with the "delimited" function, to serve as column separators.

Obviously, this is a couple more steps than a plugin would take, but it's still pretty straightforward.

Edit: A simple sort, either in Foobar or in Excel could let you get all of the albums together in a row, for example, sorting by %tracknumber%, %album% would give you
01 Aberacadabra
01 Cisco
01 Eggs!
01 Zoology
02 Aberacadabra
etc.

And you could just delete, or not copy the extraneous tracks.

For what it's worth until the time the plug-in appears, I use Tagscanner whcih allows to export playlist files as CSV which you can open and manipulate with Excel.

Just create a playlist that includes everything on the CD. This util allows you to pick and choose fields to export; it's free to boot.

http://xdev.narod.ru/tagscan_e.htm

Hope this helps.

You can easily create CSV files using a custom copy string.

.. by simply putting a ';' between the values in the copy formatting, copy/paste to a *.csv file and open with excel.

mine looks like this

Don´t forget that .cvs are ASCII files, so Unicode tags will be converted.

I would like the opposite. I would like a plugin that allows you to tag files based on what is in the Excel file.

Thanks for the replies. The copy command stuff looks like it has some merit, to output just as a .csv file. I don't really want to install any extraneous programs, which is one of the reasons I like Foobar so much, as I don't need a separate replay-gainer, tagger, etc. Is there any way to create a copy formatting pattern that would only create 1 line per album? If not, I guess the sorting by %artist% - %album% isn't too much work =]

One question about the opposite mode: How would that exactly work? I'm assuming you create a playlist with x files, in the same order as an excel file with whatever number of verticle entries, and it just tags them straight down based on the excel columns -> tags, until it either runs out of entries or files. Is that what you would like?

BO(V)BZ

Yes!

Or even based on filename. We can add the filename in the spreadsheet and get it to add the correct tags to the correct filename.

I know this isn't exactly what youre requesting, but something similar can be done by using the masstaggers "Input Data (one line per track)".