Playlist management!

[Ikeburner]

I'm aware that this or similar topics were discussed before, but most of them were ignored and this was never added to the wishlist, and I REALLY feel that there is a need for these things.

I was using Winamp 3 most of the time and had about 150 loaded playlists at a time (I know, huge memory footprint etc.), because I really like to have all my Albums shown in Winamp at all times. Now you can imagine how anoying it is to reload all these playlists/folders into the media library sidebar and rename them. This is a thing you wanna do once and never again, so there really should be a way to save all playlists that are listed under "Playlists" in the sidebar in one file (a playlist of playlists...).

In Winamp 3 I did this by manually saving and loading the studio.xnf (and other files) where the loaded playlists are saved, but I get the feeling that for Winamp 5 there is no such file that contains this information anymore.


Therefore my personal wishlist includes the following:

1. A way to import all loaded playlists from Winamp 3's sidecar-thingy when upgrading to Winamp 5

2. A way to save all playlists that are loaded/imported to the media library's sidecar in one file, because it takes a hell of a time to add all the playlist files/folders everytime I format my pc or (e.g. in the case of Winamp 3) the information get lost due to a programm crash.

3. More playlist management (this was mentioned before), like being able to create subfolders for loaded playlists, and in case the Winamp 3 sidecar-thingy is going to be part of Winamp 5 in the future, being able to have subfolders there, too.

4. In case you keep all your albums as subfolders of one folder (for example C:/Albums/Album1), there should be a way that if the big folder (C:/Albums) is loaded, that all subfolders to this become a new loaded playlists, so that you don't have to manually load every single subfolder. The only thing left to do would be renaming the playlists, maybe this could be done automatically, too, by using the subfolder's names for the playlist names.



Just to make sure you know what I'm talking about, I'm NOT talking about the folders that are added to the media library and can be searched by it, I'm talking about the playlists that appear in the left of the media library under "Playlists", similar to the way Winamp 3 handled it.

I think with these changes done, Winamp 5 would be perfect for me. I really hope somebody will read this and consider adding these things to the programm in a future version. Thanks.

[DJ Egg]

Yeah, it's a shame I guess,
but Winamp 5.0 is the direct upgrade from Winamp 2.9x
Winamp3 was a separate product player

I suppose I can now add a link to this thread in my ever growing list:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....80#post1134980
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=158335
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=157068
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....52#post1182552
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=155731
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=159500

The Winamp (2.9x / 5.x) library structure is stored in:
Winamp\Plugins\gen_ml.ini

The stored playlists are saved to PLS files in the
"Winamp\Plugins\ml" dir

The main database is stored in:
Winamp\Plugins\ml\main.dat

If you back up gen_ml.ini and the plugins/ml dir
then that should be all you need
Though I recommend that you reinstall the latest version of Winamp
after restoring the backup files
just to make sure you've got the latest versions of all the other .vmd and .idx files in the ml dir.

Apart from that, yeah, expect more love to come the library's way in 5.01 and beyond. Much much more love

[Ikeburner]

Thanks a lot, even though this is not completely the way it's meant to be, it works and helps a lot!

I'm sure improving the library is a step in the right direction, it was one of the things I liked best about Winamp 3! I'm looking forward to the next release of version 5! ^^