Issues with playlists

[johnwi]

Hello,

I am a newbie to this group. I just recently purchased the Patriot Box Office. My main use for it is to play music files, flac or mp3, and an occasion video or two - but mostly music. I purchased an internal hard drive for it, I am at bootcode 23, and I just upgraded to the latest firmware. Everything works fine for my needs.

I am probably a bit spoiled by using Songbird on my PC where you tell it what folder your music is in, then it indexes the folder and all subfolders so you have all your music in front of you. I know the Box Office does not do this and its browser is rather rudimentary. You have to manually go to each folder to play the music files in them. I sort them by Artist.

My next main hope was to do separate playlists. Going through the forum I see how one member was able to do this using a USB drive and separate .m3u files for building the playlists. Well I read this after reading the manual saying that it can't be done this way and a hard drive was needed - so I bought the hard drive.

Now my main issue, can multiple music playlists be made using an internal hard drive on this unit? I go through the software on the unit and it makes one playlist that the unit recognizes. The file generated is "m3u.Music". I hook up my computer and try to create other playlist files but the only one it recognizes is the one it created. I have searched the forums and can not see anywhere that the Patriot (or Realtek) software give me the ability to do this. You do your select and confirm and it saves everything to the same playlist. This is really useless to me as I would like multiple playlists for me and my wife. Otherwise you have to manually go to each Artist folder to play the music. Some folders only have two songs in them.

This is a good value price unit for the money and I will not return it, but is there something I am missing or that can help me with this issue? I am also waiting for a reply from the support department from an email

Sorry for such a long post. Any help will be great.

Thanks.

John

[wigout]

Here is a scripting solution, if you're interested in that sort of thing:

discussed here:
http://www.patriotmemory.com/forums/...4&postcount=29

(and follow the link in this discussion):
http://www.patriotmemory.com/forums/...ead.php?t=4496

I think what you want to do sounds possible. I hope this scripting helps.

-wigout

[Unreal]

There may be a thousand ways to do this...here is just one...

1. Connect your PBO with internal drive to your PC and it should show up as a removable disk

2. Use Winamp or your favorite music player to build and save an m3u playlist

3. Use Notepad or your favorite text editor with global search and replace to change the absolute paths in the playlist to relative paths...that is the path relative from the playlist location to the actual music file location on the PBO

4. Connect the PBO back to your entertainment system and enjoy your music playlists

With slight variations, this is what I do and it works great. My playlists have thousands of songs located in hundreds of different directories and the entire process to build them only takes a couple of minutes.

I also have about a thousand music videos, and I use the same process to build music video playlists. Works fine.

[johnwi]

Thanks for the help Wigout and Unreal.

Unreal, I found another one of your posts stating:

" Try something like this (with your original folder structure)...

..\Music\Lou Reed - Transformer\01. Vicious.mp3

The dot dot (..) tells it to go back one directory before looking for the Music folder. This is what I did for my music playlists and it works fine (on a usb attached drive).
Reply With Quote"

Finally got this thing going. I made a folder in the root directory (SYSTEM (HDD and made a folder called "MUSIC PLAYLISTS". I was struggling on the .m3u file and the path structure to use cause PBO could not find my file. I was farely sure this was a Unix based box and I knew it was a matter of putting into the path to go back one directory then search the music directory. My Unix skills are rusty. Finally found your old post tell about the "dot dot". Plugged it in and it worked. Now I can do all my playlists.

You know, I waited quite a while to buy a media player such as this, and don't get me wrong, this is a great product and a great value. I also have nothing else to compare it to. But I really thought that by now some of the GUIs and features would be more refined. You would think that the PBO would at least have the functionality to make multiple play lists. How are less computer literate people suppossed to do this. So now to do playlists you need to complete skip the functionality of the PBO, make your own .m3u playlists and go from there. Very counter intuitive. Also to bad they can't implement a music browser like Songbird. Tell it what folder to moniter and it indexes and lists all your music files.

I want to thank you guys again. At least this is a step in the right direction and I appreciate the help.

John

[Unreal]

How are less computer literate people suppossed to do this?

John

The PBO and the sub-$100 media players like it have been making improvements (I like firmware 61 best so far), but these devices are simply not ready for the masses yet and I would never recommend them to people who are not very familiar with computer technology.

[johnwi]

You are right Unreal. I looked at a number of others and they are in the same boat. I think I saw a pretty good browser on an Iomega for playing music, but somewhere there is a trade off on features. I checked out some of the WD media players, and same thing. Most do not even take a hard drive. For the money the PBO has it all. Takes some work, but nothing major. I am happy with the product.

Next is a powerline adaptor, found a WD Livewire so now I can get the PBO connected to my network. This will make it much easier to get the music downloaded and the playlists completed. Probably did not need the hard drive, but it will also works as a backup for my music.

Thanks again.

John