Create random music-collection for CD, Phone, MP3-Player,

Buttons/Scripts
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1

As most players/mediums are limited in space (e.g. CD, MP3-Player, Smartphone, USB-Stick,...), most people can't copy all their music-files to it. But a manual selection of files takes a lot of time and also it's not really random because you select them :wink:!

With this button you can create a random playlist of your music-files and add them to a collection for further usage (e.g. adding files manually, etc.). If the collection doesn't exists, it will be automatically created (and existing cleared).

The button uses "MixTape" (Link: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Seedling/MixTape/index.html), which offers lot of options, like:

  • max. size (e.g. 700 MB for CD)
  • max. number of files
  • genre
  • year (e.g. from 1998 to 2010)

and much more. I tried some different tools and decided to use MixTape, because it's: Free, small, portable and stores its settings where it was executed from (so it could be stored in DO-scripts-folder and also exported to USB!).

How to use: By clicking the button, MixTape will be executed. After you've created and saved your playlist, close MixTape and DO will ask you for the playlist-file and imports it into a DO-collection named "MixTape".

Button-code (please change path to "mixtape.exe" and desired collection-name twice to yours):

@sync: /dopusdata\Scripts\MixTape\MixTape.exe
@set var = {dlgopen|Choose MixTape-Playlist:|*.m3u}
/home\dopusrt.exe /col clear "MixTape"
/home\dopusrt.exe /col import /create /ansi "MixTape" "{$var}"
Delete "{$var}" QUIET

Note: I clear existing collection (line 3) and delete the imported playlist at the end - you may change this! This is just an example-button!

2

This works like a charm and very useful! Thank you for sharing @Sasa.

3

Hi Sasa, glad you got it working somehow.. o)

I've one question though. MixTape seems to support dragging the created playlist files directly to where you want the files to be (mp3-player drive e.g.). I guess once you have the filecollection ready, you make nothing different than copying the files, but then just with DO instead of MixTape ?! So what kind of improvement is that step of creating the DO filecollection ?!

4

To be honest I didn't test drag'n'drop :slight_smile: (you can also try "RandomCopy", which copies the files directly). But I usually add a few MP3's (e.g. new ones from the Charts) manually and fill the free space left with random music, which is more comfortable using a collection instead of d'n'd them between different programs. And you may want to make changes to the list, so you can copy the "final" collection at once (that's faster than making changes on the external device itself and easier than within MixTape). Also you may want to lower the bitrate to save space, which can be done in one step for example by using my MP3-button (somewhere here).

Finally I'm still searching for a commandline-only-based solution which can be controlled by DO w/o any separate GUI. I would prefer creating a collection w/o any file-dialogues (except random-options and maybe collection-name).