1   Name

mkplaylist.py -- creates playlists from directory trees.

2   Synopsis

mkplaylist.py [-h|--help|--version]
mkplaylist.py [options] directory [directory ...]

The directories are the ones where the scripts starts to search for media files.

3   Description

The script scans the given directories for media files with known file name extensions and writes the names into a playlist file in M3U or extended M3U format. Those very simple formats are used or at least understood by the vast majority of media players on different platforms.

Symlinks to directories are not scanned to avoid running into cycles.

4   Requirements

The script requires Python version 2.3 or higher.

For reading meta data from media files some third party modules are needed. The program will run without those modules, but doesn't generate meta information output for those formats ofcourse.

5   Commandline Options

--version	show program's version number and exit
-h, --help	show this help message and exit
-oOUTFILE, --output=OUTFILE
	name of the output file or '-' for stdout (default)
-fOUTPUT_FORMAT, --output-format=OUTPUT_FORMAT
	format of the output ['extm3u', 'm3u'] (default: extm3u)
--shuffle	shuffle the playlist before saving it.

6   Examples

Scan the directory /data/music and write all media files into a (sorted) playlist named playlist.m3u:

./mkplaylist.py -o playlist.m3u /data/music

Scan the directories /data/music/Various and /data/Music/Soundtracks and write a shuffled playlist without meta information to standard output:

./mkplaylist.py -f m3u --shuffle /data/music/Various     \
                                 /data/music/Soundtracks

7   Output Formats

8   Credits

Many thanks to Oliver Pütz for sharing patches and thoughts.

9   History

0.3 : 2004-12-03

Finally meta data is extracted from MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files so this thingy does actually more than the find-based Bash script I used before for the job.

The script became a little bit more "silent" -- only directory names are printed and not every discovered media file.

0.2 : 2004-11-08

The playlist is sorted now and can be shuffled with an option (--shuffle). It's possible to give more than one directory name at the command line.

There are many changes under the surface to allow extensions to read meta data from the media files and to support different output formats too. That's the reason for the new -f and --output-format options which are not very useful at the moment because the only allowed value is m3u which happens to be the default anyway.

0.1.1 : 2004-10-23

Fixed a minor(?) packaging problem. The archive content is now in an own subdirectory. Much more standard on Unices. :-)

0.1 : 2004-10-20

Initial release. Creates simple playlists in M3U format.

10   ToDo

• exclude files by name pattern (simple or even regular expressions),
• list known file name extensions in --help output,
• (x)html output,
• use logging module and add switches -v and --verbose,
• add more playlist formats,
• filter local directory prefix ("./") from file names in the playlist,
• add more possibilities to read meta data (other ID3 modules, kfile, etc.),
• maybe adding a meta data cache to speed up re-indexing of large media file collections,
• debug / dump output format.

11   Bugs

None known yet. If you find some please send me a mail.

12   Copyright

Copyright © 2004 Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <marc@rintsch.de>

This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.