maemo.org - Talk - How to play all music shuffled without playing audio books or podcasts

Here are couple of scripts to create a random playlist of music-only tracks. I include them here for anyone that wants to have a go at doing the same.

My favourite media player is Canola but it still doesn't differentiate between "spoken audio" and "music audio". Some days I like to listen to podasts or audio books and some days I like to play all of my music at random. However, when I currently use Canola to play at random all the audio files are mixed together and I have about 1000 music files and almost the same number of audio book files, so the built-in random play feature of Canola is not ideal.

The script doesn't apply just to the Canola media player as it simply creates a playlist of shuffled music files so should work with any media player that can read playlists.

Here are the scripts:

createPlaylist.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh



MUSIC1="/media/mmc1/audio/music"

MUSIC2="/media/mmc2/audio/music"

PLAYLIST="allMusicShuffled.m3u"

SCRIPTS="/media/mmc2/scripts/playlists"



find ${MUSIC1}|egrep -i ".mp3$|.wma$|.ogg$" > ${MUSIC1}/allMusic1.m3u

find ${MUSIC2}|egrep -i ".mp3$|.wma$|.ogg$" > ${MUSIC1}/allMusic2.m3u



TOTAL1=`cat ${MUSIC1}/allMusic1.m3u|wc -l`

TOTAL2=`cat ${MUSIC1}/allMusic2.m3u|wc -l`



echo "found ${TOTAL1} songs in ${MUSIC1}"

echo "found ${TOTAL2} songs in ${MUSIC2}"



cat ${MUSIC1}/allMusic1.m3u > ${MUSIC1}/allMusic.m3u

cat ${MUSIC1}/allMusic2.m3u >> ${MUSIC1}/allMusic.m3u



echo "writing shuffled playlist to : ${MUSIC1}/${PLAYLIST}"

cat ${MUSIC1}/allMusic.m3u|perl ${SCRIPTS}/shuffle.pl > ${MUSIC1}/${PLAYLIST}

rm ${MUSIC1}/allMusic.m3u

rm ${MUSIC1}/allMusic1.m3u

rm ${MUSIC1}/allMusic2.m3u



echo "done"

shuffle.pl

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl



use List::Util 'shuffle';



my @list=<STDIN>;



@shuffled = shuffle(@list);

foreach(@shuffled) {

   print $_;

}

Here's a few tips/caveats:
o The scripts should be saved to the folder:
/media/mmc2/scripts/playlists/
o run the following to allow the scripts to be executable:
cd /media/mmc2/scripts/playlists/;chmod 755 *
o the following directories should exist and contain your music-only files:
/media/mmc1/audio/music/
/media/mmc2/audio/music/
o I like to keep my files in the following structure across both SD cards to keep the types of audio separate:
/media/mmcX/audio/music/artist/album/
/media/mmcX/audio/spokenWord
/media/mmcX/audio/podcasts
The above structure is not required though as long as only the music files are contained in the /media/mmcX/audio/music directory and/or sub-directories
o to run from xterm, use the following command (note the sh is required as the script is being run from the SD card):
sh /media/mmc2/scripts/playlists/createPlaylist.sh

Rather than use xterm, a better way to launch it though is via "Personal Launcher" (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/O...rsonal-launch/) or "kerez" (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2007/kerez/).

Once run, the output is:
found XXXX songs in /media/mmc1/audio/music
found XXXX songs in /media/mmc2/audio/music
writing shuffled playlist to :
/media/mmc1/audio/music/allMusicShuffled.m3u
done

An extra tip for Canola users is that if you run the script and then close and re-open Canola the change will be picked up. Then go to your playlists in Canola and you will find the playlist "allMusicShuffled".