Hi,

I've got a problem that I've spent some time trying to solve with little success. What I would like to do is to open up a playlist from the playlist directory and have the option of copying (not moving) all the songs from that playlist, which may be dispersed across lots of different directories if the songs are from a variety of arists or albums, to an arbitrary location like "f:\" (in the case of my usb-connected mp3 player), or "c:\local_songs".

My mp3s are all stored on a samba file server (soon to add nfs for linux clients). The share gets mounted as s: in windows. The files are stored under s:\mp3s\artist\album\01-track_name.mp3. I store m3u playlists under a separate directory called, imaginatively enough, playlists, i.e., s:\mp3s\playlists\my_favs.m3u.

Clearly the process of manually going through explorer and selecting and copying each song individually is tedious. Also, I don't need something uber-fancy like a catalog-all-your-songs-and-download-lyrics-and-album-art-and-store-playists-in-a-proprietary-database jukebox program. Just something simple on the order of winamp (or simpler).

Also if there is a tool to do this in linux that would be great too (for my linux clients).

I'm thinking this could be done fairly simply in perl, but I have very little experience in perl, and I think my wife would prefer a gui, anyway.

If all else fails, I'd recommend foobar2000 for Windows.

Load a playlist into foobar2000, and drag-and-drop entries from the playlist into any folder.

Cool, I'll try foobar2000. I've heard it's good, but hadn't gotten around to checking it out. Now i'm properly motivated.

I've always thought it was retarded that you can drag&drop TO winamp's playlist, but not FROM it.

in foobar2000, if you're using 0.9 beta 6,
you could select all the files in the playlist you want to move,
right click
-> file operations, move, rename or copy files
-> choose rename or move files in the drop down menu on left top, select the output file format (it is easy to change the format), select the destination folder on the right hand side of the window
-> Run.
It's easy when you've done it once. Try it :-)

iTunes will also allow you to drop and drag files from within the music library. It will create a copy of the highlighted files wherever you drag them to. It's pretty simple, but you would need to create the appropriate folders for yourself before copying the files over. That's the only drawback I could think of, especially if you need to create a large quantity of them.
J

I checked out foobar2k (not the new beta) and it does indeed rock. so much to figure out now. Thanks for the tips.

I'll give itunes a try. Had never really considered it before, not being the owner of an ipod. Also I know it has it's own organizational mechanism/database/etc. Not sure if I can make it work with my simplistic organizational method & m3u playlists.

Hi. I have a tiny utility I got a long time ago that works with Winamp 2.8 and up.

It adds an option to "copy playlist files" option to the drop down dialogue box.

It lets you select an output directory and also numbers the files if you want to so as to avoid alphabetical sorting.

It even reads the size in megabytes of the group of files selected if you are trying to load a flash player.

I will e-mail it to whoever if you PM me.....

MediaMonkey can do it too.

http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlgenyar.html

That's the one.Nice little utility.