Happy Birthday, MinimServer!

[simoncn]

(29-01-2013 06:34)wappinghigh Wrote:  David. Yes Simon mentioned this, but I didn't realise I needed to put in the "#" in front of "AudioData"..

Now you have mentioned this again, I tried this again> I have just done this, and it works! This is totally AWESOME!

I can now sort my library ...all within the Control4 Driver...on any Control4 remote, or touchscreen, or idevice or on computer app...into different file bit types (16 vs 24) and low vs hi resolutions. UNREAL!!!!!!

Way to go. AWESOME WORK SIMON!!!!

David: thanks for pointing this out.

The # in front of #AudioData is needed to make sure this built-in name can't conflict with a real file tag named AudioData. You can use the "colon" syntax in indexTags to rename #AudioData to any index name of your choice (including AudioData without the #).

In the next release, I'm planning to improve the grouping of the #AudioData index entries (to make them coarser-grained) and also add a new tag #AudioFormat which will contain values like FLAC, MP3, etc.

[Manul]

I'm a bit late to the party, having just discovered MinimServer in the last couple of days while looking for an audio server to put on my new NAS, but I'd like to join in congratulating MinimServer on it's first and obviously very successful year and also in thanking Simon for giving us this nice piece of software: Thank you, Simon! Happy Birthday, MinimServer!

Regarding iTunes playlists: These can be quite easily parsed from the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. I wrote a ~30 line python script to do that and output them as m3u files just yesterday which I'd happily share - it should be doable just as easy in Java as well, I guess. One possible solution would be to add m3u support to MinimServer and either leave it to the user to regularly run a tool like this or build one into MinimServer. Please let me know if I can lend a hand in anything.

[simoncn]

(03-02-2013 20:37)Manul Wrote:  I'm a bit late to the party, having just discovered MinimServer in the last couple of days while looking for an audio server to put on my new NAS, but I'd like to join in congratulating MinimServer on it's first and obviously very successful year and also in thanking Simon for giving us this nice piece of software: Thank you, Simon! Happy Birthday, MinimServer!

Regarding iTunes playlists: These can be quite easily parsed from the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. I wrote a ~30 line python script to do that and output them as m3u files just yesterday which I'd happily share - it should be doable just as easy in Java as well, I guess. One possible solution would be to add m3u support to MinimServer and either leave it to the user to regularly run a tool like this or build one into MinimServer. Please let me know if I can lend a hand in anything.

Thanks very much!

I'm impressed that you could parse the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and export .m3u playlists in only 30 lines of code.

I'm hoping to add support to MinimServer for .m3u playlists soon. As well as your Python script, it seems that iTunes has the capability to export playlists to .m3u files (see this page). This .m3u approach could provide a first step towards making iTunes and MinimServer work together.

[Manul]

(03-02-2013 21:20)simoncn Wrote:  I'm impressed that you could parse the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and export .m3u playlists in only 30 lines of code.

I'm hoping to add support to MinimServer for .m3u playlists soon. As well as your Python script, it seems that iTunes has the capability to export playlists to .m3u files (see this page). This .m3u approach could provide a first step towards making iTunes and MinimServer work together.

Nothing to be impressed about, the Python standard library includes a very good tool to handle plist files which are basically dictionary type data structures encoded in xml, so the translation into a Python dictionary comes for free. From there on it's just looking up the filenames for every track of a playlist.

A quick Google search turned up two Java libraries for handling plist files: http://code.google.com/p/plist/ (MIT license) and http://sourceforge.net/projects/plist/ (LGPL).

Exporting from iTunes would require a lot of manual interventions every time a playlist is changed (including iTunes' 'smart playlists'), so I went for the scripted approach to get all playlists in one go.

[Mike48]

Happy Birthday to Minim, and as always Great Appreciation to Simon!