New Wave Outpost Forum

Does anybody know an easy way to generate a playlist of mp3's on a computer, short of typing them out by hand?

I would guess that it depends on the program. In iTunes for example you'd simply select a playlist and say Expost Songlist or even just select a bunch of songs and copy and paste them into a spreadsheet or word processor.

If you copy or paste in Windows, you get the whole music file. Pasting that into Word for instance just forms a link to the file (you click it and it plays). It won't even let you paste them into Excel. The closest I can get is to say I want to change the file name, then copy and paste it. This doesn't work for multiple files however.

Somebody must know how to do this . . . or maybe there's a freeware program.

What program are you using? It just worked fine for me in iTunes Windows and Mac.

I might be confused by what you want to do...but in WinAmp, open the playlist editor, put the songs you want into the playlist, and then click Misc --> Generate HTML Playlist. That spits out a web page that you can do with as you see fit.

If you want a list of all your MP3s in a directory, I open a CMD window in Windows XP, go to "My Music" and type "DIR *.MP3 > allmusic.txt" which then creates allmusic.txt of all my MP3s.

But in the above I am creating lists of files from existing playlists. I take it you want to create the playlist itself? Like the "Auto DJ" function, where you choose the time and various criteria? My Rio Music Manager can do that, as can Yahoo Music Engine.

So what I think you want may be done in a few steps.
1. Open Winamp (or other player).
2. Drag desired files to playlist editor.
3. Export playlist as HTML.
4. Open HTML file in Word/Excel/notepad. You might want to save HTML as TXT in your browser to strip out the HTML tags, or use an HTML tag stripping program.

Or maybe this (if you want a list of all files in the directory):
1. open CMD window and execute DIR command as needed
2. open TXT file in Excel
3. Do "Text to columns" as needed if you want to split out artist, filename, etc.

But I fear I do not understand what you're aiming at. Can you be more specific as to what you want to do?

-pretzelbag.

hi,
you could try this prog: Mpeg audio collection..if Im not mistaken it does what you want.
http://mac.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for taking the time to answer, everybody, especially Pretzelbag. I'll be trying some of your suggestions.

I ended up downloading the program Demised recommended and though I only played with it for a minute, it looks like it will do the job.

It's got a very cool tag editor, like Pretzelbag recommended, and will make it easy to update collection info whenever I need it.

Thanks again guys!