Visual Studio is a Great Playlist Editor! or 2500 Songs Without Using a Single Meg of HDD!
My Media Player play list now has 2500 songs without using a single megabyte of hard disk space.
I subscribe to Easynews.com which for a short explanation is newsgroups via a browser. For those of you who are familiar with newsgroups know you can find (a lot) of music within them. One such group is ABS.mp3.complete_cd. I had a yearning to be able to randomly listen to songs/files within this group so I can expand my appreciation of music to new levels. A nice feature of Easynews is their web-based listing of the contents of newsgroups.
And a feature I find even nicer is the Easynews Advanced Search Page which members can find at http://members.easynews.com/global
After searching the complete_cd group for any media file within the last 30 days I get a listing of 4977 files via 500 file pages. Now if I view source and copy and paste the HTML into a blank text file in Visual Studio I can do a few find and replaces to reformat the data to a playlist for Windows Media Player.
First, the format for a WMP playlist(.WPL) is like this:
<?wpl version="1.0"?>
<smil>
<head>
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Windows Media Player -- 9.0.0.3075"/>
<author/>
<title>Temp</title>
</head>
<body>
<seq>
<media src="Path to mp3 file.mp3" />
<media src="Path to mp3 file.mp3" />
<media src="Path to mp3 file.mp3" />
<media src="Path to mp3 file.mp3" />
</seq>
</body>
</smil>
The media nodes are the mp3 files. Simple enough right?
Well…
The source html looks something like this now:
<tr id=”someid”><a href=”/news/filename.mp3”></tr>
With a few M3U’s thrown in too. I will have to get rid of these lines.
<tr id=”someid”><a href=”/news/filename.m3u”></tr>
Each line from the html needs to be reformatted to a:
<media src=”http://members.easynews.com/news/filename.mp3” />
Here are some of the find and replaces I used. These are good examples of how to use the regular expressions to reformat the data. Also, from inside the find and replace window in Visual Studio you can find a link to more help on regular expressions.
Find What: ^.*href="/news
Replace With: <media src="http://members.easynews.com/news
This replaces the first half of the line:
<tr id=”someid”><a href=”/news
With:
<media src=”http://members.easynews.com/news/
The ^ character anchors the find to the beginning of a line.
The .* matches any character of any amount.
Find What: .mp3"\>.*$
Replace With: .mp3" />
This replaces everything after and including the:
.mp3”></tr>
With:
.mp3” />
The $ character anchors the find to the end of the line.
The \ character escapes the following character.
Find What: ^.*tr\>$\n
Replace With:
This one gets rid of some extra lines.
The lines with the m3u did not have the previous mp3 replacement.
So now where the search find a line that ends in tr> it replaces the entire line.
The \n means new line, this find looks from the beginning of the line to the end of the line plus a new line character and replaces it with nothing, this effectively deletes the unwanted lines.
The end result about five minutes later is a 2500 song playlist without a single meg of my HDD used!
Now, I need to find a news server that can provide me with unlimited or a daily compromise for $10 a month. If anyone knows of one please let me know.