Bookmark->Playlist

Has anyone come up with a way to peel a bookmark off of the player and convert it into a playlist yet?

"Convert" it into a playlist? Care to elaborate? Not sure how one would go about converting bookmarks (stored running orders) into playlists.

Also, if the scratch partition format has changed for v3, that would present a problem for such a utility, since that's where the bookmarks live.

"Convert" it into a playlist? Care to elaborate?

Why ssssoitanly.

Let's start with the following assumption:

- The current running order of tracks is stored on the scratch partition as a bunch of binary information that essentially amounts to a list of FIDs.

- The Bookmarks are stored in a similar fashion.

- There has been some research time put into learning how the running order is stored, and the empeg guys have been helpful in giving us tips on the format.

- A playlist is merely a collection of FIDs.

- The format for creating FIDs and playlists is well known, and there are already third party tools that let us do that.

So in theory, we could read one of the bookmarks (or the current running order) by looking at the scratch partition and extracting the list of FIDs. Once we have that list, it's trivial to create a playlist out of it.

Purpose:

Suppose I've used the Insert/Enqueue/Append features to create a playlist "live" realtime instead of through emplode. Or perhaps I've shuffled my whole player and I've used the "Hate album" tweak to remove certain albums from the running order. Or perhaps some combination of the above. Now I've got a really nice running order (either saved as the current running order or saved as a bookmark), and I'd like to make a real playlist out of that, something I can further edit in emplode and which doesn't use up a bookmark slot.

Of course, I'm doing the usual "asking for something for nothing" routine here of suggesting a programming project that I've got no intention of doing myself...

There has been some research time put into learning how the running order is stored, and the empeg guys have been helpful in giving us tips on the format.

For 2.0, yes. I've cracked that nut already for emphatic. A small tweak to my routine for reading the running order could read the FIDs stored in bookmarks pretty easily. Thing is I received many words of caution from peter to avoid spending a lot of time on that format, since it would be changing "real soon."

True. Okay, so if the file format changes, then there will need to be some adjustments to any algorithms which read that file format. Surely it can't be changing THAT much, just some adjustments to field sizes and such?

Sounds like since you've already got code working to read the 2.0 format, then that ship's already sailed, right? It's not like you're deliberately holding off doing any work on the format for fear it'll change?

Anyway, this is all hypothetical talk. I was just wondering if anyone had done anything like this already.

Surely it can't be changing THAT much, just some adjustments to field sizes and such?

My understanding was the changes were going to be much more sweeping than that. I seem to remember they were going to move to variable-length records so that more running order entries could fit in the limited space in an attempt to avoid the pgrzelak problem (running order too large to be preserved across power cycles.)

But for 2.0, the code I have (with some minor tweaks) would be able to spit out the FIDs in a running order or bookmark. Merging that with something that can create the playlists, etc. would be someone else's kettle of fish.

I see how that could be an issue. Hmm.