Hi! Here's an idea for a plugin - is it possible to make?
I would like to store windows "Shortcut to..." files as shortcuts to MP3 files. This way I could have songs from an album in a folder for an album, but when these songs are also on a compilation or best of, I could have a folder for the best of and just put Windows shortcut files to the MP3s that would have to be in both folders otherwise. That would save space but I'd like to have different tags for the two files. (For example, the Album tag would have to be different.)
Can anyone make a plugin like that? All that it would need is to be able to find out if the .LNK file points to an audio file, and to be able to tag the .LNK file to supersede the original file's tag.

Cool, I would use this plugin.

Why not stick an .m3u file in the second directory which points to the files in the other directory? Alternately, if you are in NT or Unix, using symbolic file linking... holler if you don't know about the latter.

ciaran

I also would use a plugin that did this.



How exactly would this work? If an .m3u file is a playlist, will it actually be visible in another playlist? I don't really understand.

foobar doesnt seem to mind tagging the shortcut files *.lnk, if thats all you need. also, i renamed a .lnk to .mp3 and foobar tagged it.

seems what you'd need though, is for foobar to *execute* that shorcut.

thats a feature i would like to see in foobar. when it gets to a non music file, it would open the file. so if it came to a .jpg in your album folder, it would open it as if you had opened it in explorer. like, for me, if foobar would open a .jpg, ACDSee would come up with the pic loaded. if it came accross an .nfo, it would open it with notepad.

To extend this idea, if it came across a link to a video file, foobar could execute the file (in whatever video software), then continue to the next file in the playlist after the video's finished. The link could store the length of the video file, so foobar knows when to carry on. This would solve a problem for people who have music videos as part of their music collection (ie me).

Are there any plugin developers out there with thoughts on all this? The features in this thread would be very cool to have.

Perhaps a special foobar link format would be a way to do this?

Yes, I know this thread is over a year old but please bear with me.

I also have the original albums in folders containing the MP3's and then create a playlist in a compilation that points to the MP3. For example:

R\Rage Against The Machine\1992 - Rage Against The Machine\07 - Wake Up.mp3
Soundtracks\1998 - The Matrix\13 - (Rage Against The Machine) - Wake Up.m3u

As you'd expect, the playlist has a reference to the MP3.

Ideally I would like to know whether it is possible to store playlists within playlists and the database be able to keep tags against the playlist that are different from the MP3.

I have played around with .fpl files and can see that tag information is copied from the MP3 into the .fpl but I can't add additional tags. Any insights into editing .fpl files would be appreciated.

Or, should I just replace the playlists with the mp3 and forget about it ?

Cheers,

c0utta

What do you mean by "can't add additional tags"? If you edit the tags in an fb2k playlist, it edits the tags of the actual file. You can disable this temporarily by going to Preferences->Tag writing and checking the "Don't update files, only change cached info" box. This way, you can update the tags in the playlist without it touching the tags in your files. However, this probably wouldn't work too well as far as the database is concerned. Hrm.

c0utta was talking about changing the information cached in an .fpl or .m3u file, something that doesn't work.

Windows shortcuts cannot be tagged, APL link files can.

IIRC cuesheets should work.

Thanks guys!

I started using CUE files but found that when they were refreshed, the data in the database was refreshed.

In the end I've used APL files to do this and work perfectly. Took me ages to create one (MakeAPL wouldn't work) and I tried everything to get foobar to write APL's (as specified on this forum using foo_apl) but was unsuccessful. I finally created a text file and then added the tags through foobar.

I have achieved exactly what I wanted.

Cheers,

c0utta