relax the matching criteria for imported (m3u8) playlists

[Lefan]

Could you relax the matching criteria even further to ignore the format as last resort?

My use case is as follows:

On PC I use foobar2000 to mange my music. I lot of it is in FLAC format, which is fine while on PC. On mobile I have been using foobar2000's mobile version up until now. It has some limitations but one very key feature (for me) is: fpl-playlists (the foobar playlist format) work on mobile even if I'm not playing the same file. I don't copy the FLAC's to mobile but I converted most of it to opus. But the fpl-format and the mobile version still manages to play the song even if the location and format changed. I think the same can be achieved when I export the playlist as m3u8-files. It partially works but as expected the FLAC-files cannot be found.

So I would like to ask if it is also possible to exclude the file ending from the matching algorithm (i.e. if no match in the right format was found).

Of course I could try to edit the m3u8 files (to change the file ending) but it's not always FLAC to opus. Some legacy stuff is also MP3 and sometimes it's not flac. So the script would start to become complicated...

 

[maxmp]

@Lefan I guess it can it's possible (as option). Especially if few other similar option requirests accumulate, so that can be implemented in one "package". Thanks for the request!

[andrewilley]

I guess as a fallback it could make sense. So if a direct match for "foldername/filename.flac" is not found, look for a wildcard match with "foldername/filename.*". I agree it's a rare case, but no harm in allowing for it.

Andre

[Lefan]

4 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I guess as a fallback it could make sense. So if a direct match for "foldername/filename.flac" is not found, look for a wildcard match with "foldername/filename.*". I agree it's a rare case, but no harm in allowing for it.

Yes, that is exactly what I have been looking for.

I just tried out my manual approach and I found that I have some files which are working and some files which are not. This is due to the ones not working not matching with the correct foldername. For example it's "<something>foldername/filename.<other>". Would you also consider just looking at the filename as an even further step? I am actually a bit torn on this one. It could create more cases of ambiguity and I am considering to just fix my folder structure. What do you think?

[andrewilley]

As you say, using filenames only could be very ambiguous, especially if you don't use very detailed lengthy filenames and rely mainly on the containing folder to differentiate songs - although as a last resort, I believe 'Rescan/Resolve Playlists' will try to do that.

Using just the containing folder seems a good compromise instead of requiring the entire absolute path to match, which clearly would prevent any portability of playlist files at all.

Andre

[Lefan]

19 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I agree it's a rare case, but no harm in allowing for it.

Maybe somewhat off-topic, but I would like to ask: How do you do this? I have 80 GB of lossless music and converted it's just 10 GB. This allows my to take all my music with my without the need to by a very big SD card.

[andrewilley]

@Lefan I just copy what I want from my PC over to my phone's 256GB SD Card. There are a few FLACs in my collection, but most are high quality MP3s in the first place.

Andre

[Lefan]

6 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

although as a last resort, I believe 'Rescan/Resolve Playlists' will try to do that.

This did not help. But yeah, I think I will just fix my folder structure 😅

 

33 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

look for a wildcard match

As I said, this would really help and I would switch to PA 😀

To follow up on foobar2000 being able to find by files even though the folder doesn't even match: The playlists are way bigger than m3u8 files. So I guess there is some metadata match or something else.

[Lefan]

2 hours ago, maxmp said:

Thanks for the request!

You're welcome

It's not possible to contribute to PA, right? I'd gladly add that feature myself if I could^^