Question About Mplayer And Exaile.

[Azuma]

How do these programs sort music? Is it a manual folder based setup? (like the psp for instance. You make all the folders yourself.) Or can they automatically sort your music into artist, album, genre, etc. ?(like an iPod) Just wondering if I should spend the next few hours sorting the music on my SD card or just throw them into a folder. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Exaile has a music library, or you can just whack a folder into a playlist and go.

I choose the second option personally!

 

[Azuma]

Ok, Thanks

 

[SomeGuy99]

SomeGuy: i had a tough time back in the gp2x days, with a external usb HD full of mp3 attached to the cradle. Boy that was painfully slow to read folders. Have you already tried to manage thousands of files at once? How long does it take?

Hehe. I have a solution for that!

I use a script to scan for all MP3 files on all inserted media and play them back in the command line Mplayer. The playlist it builds is also shuffled using a Linux utility. With two 16gb cards, 4gb of music and even other stuff stuck in the USB slot (other memory cards, Ipod Shuffle, PSP) it's seriously quick.

I mapped all the player controls, and launching/quitting to keyboard keys.

Basically, I hit 'Ctrl-alt-m' and all my music is playing back within 1 second (seriously). I don't even bother to call up a window, it just runs in the background! I control it with the aforementioned keyboard shortcuts.

I even made a quick and dirty frontend using an XFCE taskbar!

I was planning on writing a guide about it, it'll be pretty long though.