Howdy there,

I have a question regarding the best means of making mass (hopefully automated) edits to .fpl files.

I'm going to be migrating my entire mp3 collection (currently spanning 4 hard drives) onto 1 giant raid system within the next few weeks.

In the past I've been keeping one huge "favorites" playlist that has thousands of songs all spread over the 4 different drive, and as I want to consolodate my entire collection onto 1 raid drive, when I copy all the music over, all the path names in my "favorites" playlist will be broken.

Most of the actual file path will be the same, but the drive names will be changed (from D:\, E:\, F:\, G:\) to this singular raid drive (probably D:\). I'm guessing I can just replace the "Drive name" parts in my old .fpl, keep the rest of the directory structure intact (as it will be identical on the new raid system), substitute in the new drive name, and this'll all work a-ok.

My question is what would be the best way to do this? Can I just grep my way through the current .fpl and replace the old drive name with the new Raid system drive name? Is there a better way to do this?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Well, after some quick examination of my main playlist, it seems there is a default directory "C:\mp3\" (I think that's the one set in "Restrict directories to" in my Database preferences.) Any files in this directory and directories dont have the drive assigned, just the folder, like this:
file://Atheist\1993 - Elements\Atheist - Elements - 02 - Water.mp3

But other directories not in that main directory specify the drive letter:
file://C:\Images\Audio CDs\Anathema - A Fine Day To Exit\Anathema - A Fine Day To Exit - 09 - Temporary Peace.ape

Luckily you are keeping the same directory structure. Back up your play list first, just incase this doesnt work as planned..

OK, add .txt to the end of your playlist then open it in Word or other similar program. Press Ctrl+H (at least In Word) to bring up the Replace box. Type in "H:\" or whatever drive in the first box and "D:\" in the second box. Or if folder X on D:\ is set in your Database preferences, you can leave that second box empty.

Save, remove the .txt from the file and give it a try.

Gonna give this a shot, thanks

I'd rather be carefull using such a monster as word for such a thing. Take a good old text editor (e.g. Ultra Edit, Context or whatever you prefer) to do so. Word is pretty bad in leaving ASCII-files as they were before.

If I find some time some day, I'll write a tool to accomplish this. Shouldn't be easy, since it's simple text replacement.

As fpl are binary files search for a software that does that in binary files

I've tried editing the file in an editor that preserves binary files (emacs) and this didn't work for me. I suspect there is some sort of checksum in the file or the length of these strings are stored in the file.

I'd be interested in hearing if you did make it work.

Richard

I'm pretty sure the masstagger will update playlists as well as the database.