WinAmp 5 Smart Playlists

[Shovel]

OK, fuck knows which forum this is supposed to go in. Tech? Music? General?

Right: I use iTunes. However, it's niggling at me so I tried WinAmp5 again yesterday. It sounded better, it was faster and nicer. The interface wasn't as nice, but livable with.

However, what it didn't do was Smart Playlists. It's the one thing with iTunes that I bloody love and can't do without, so the question: Does anyone know of a plugin for Winamp that implements them? I've tried searching Winamp.com for Smart Playlists and I get nothing suitable, but that might be because I'm crap at searching.

Thanks.

Ben

 

[Covenant]

OK, fuck knows which forum this is supposed to go in. Tech? Music? General?

Right: I use iTunes. However, it's niggling at me so I tried WinAmp5 again yesterday. It sounded better, it was faster and nicer. The interface wasn't as nice, but livable with.

However, what it didn't do was Smart Playlists. It's the one thing with iTunes that I bloody love and can't do without, so the question: Does anyone know of a plugin for Winamp that implements them? I've tried searching Winamp.com for Smart Playlists and I get nothing suitable, but that might be because I'm crap at searching.

Thanks.

Ben

DUnno exactly what Smart Playlists are, but if it's sort of a jukebox to suggest them from genres of music, Moodlogic is pretty fine.

 

[Shovel]

Aha, I suppose describing them would have been helpful.

Right: A "Smart Playlist", as Apple calls them.

iTunes has a media library, it cataglogues everything by ID tag, as well tags for rating and play-count. A Smart Playlist is essentially a set of rules (or a query) to dynamically make a playlist from this.

For instance: I can make a smart playlist to play all music by a particular artist, but know that when I add future albums by that artist it will add them all too. I could also tell it to include songs that an artist has collaborated on (if I set my ID tags up thoroughly). Cleverer still, I can have a playlist to play only music that I've rated as 4 stars+, but which I've not played for 2 months.

So yeah, something that does that for WinAmp is the target

 

[Scooba da Bass]

You could do it pretty easily with Foobar2K using a custom tag and the shuffle plugin...not that it really helps, but hell, FB2K is a really nice player so you should swap over anyway.

 

[Shovel]

Thanks Scoob, I shall give it a look

 

[Xavier]

Bear in mind that Foobar is teh ugly.

There's a big rev to iTunes due quite soon, so if you decide to stick with it for a week or two you should notice both the system footprint and playback improve considerably.

Xav

 

[Shovel]

Well, Winamp 5 is using constant 40% CPU at the moment, so I'm sticking with iTunes for the time being

Did look at Foobar, and I'll pry a little more when I've got time. I'm a fickle sod though, so I fear I'll sucum to looks I will give it a good chance though

 

[MYstIC G]

Winamp can do all of that, load the media library & add a playlist and use the query functions... of course winamp 5 is shite though.

 

[Shovel]

Bugger - so it does.

Thank you
OK, just need to figure out this huge CPU usage now...

Thanks MG, I'll call you next time I can't find my glasses and all

 

[Scooba da Bass]

Another Bump For The Mighty Foobar!

4 odd hours of non stop playback, about 6K of files loaded up and it's sitting at 2% cpu usage and 2,252 K mem usage.

It can be made to look reasonably good however since I'd imagine most people just leave it minimised that's not really a problem, plus if you're concerned with how it looks you're kinda missing the point of it sounding so much better than even Winamp with the MAD decoder. You also get the benefit of gapless mp3 playback from Lame encoded sources (nothing else does this afaik) as well as support for APE tags which don't run the risk of corrupting your files unlike IDv2 and are unlimited in length.

 

[Shovel]

Really lazy question (I'm really busy... and on this forum... arse): What are APE tags?

In other news I've tracked down the WinAMP CPU usage issue: All seems to be caused by the Modern Skins whatsit. If I switch back to Classic style the CPU goes back down to zilch. I've given myself lots of work to do this weekend, but maybe next week I'll give Foobar a more thorough look. Thanks Scoob.

 

[Scooba da Bass]

APE tags are a way of tagging derived from the Monkey's Audio lossless format. They suffer from none of the problems with IDv2 and have all of the benefits. Unfortunately not many players support them yet since the majority of users aren't aware of the potential problems.

 

[Shovel]

I read something about corruption? Didn't say much of any detail though.

 

[Mazling]

Have you tried using winamp's media library ? You didn't say.
Bring up the menu, and click... er, media library
Not sure if it's quite the same as what you meant, because I've never used iTunes.
(ot: give foobar a winshade mode similar to winamp, and i'm all over it)

 

[Scooba da Bass]

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=18978&hl=winshade

That thread will show you how to get winshade mode working.

edit; for those who enjoy iTunes interface and yet don't enjoy requiring 4 tb to play a file check out the foo_tunes ui Screeny