playlister
about
./mkplaylists creates simple playlists for each main directory within your music library, which can be opened with players like cmus.
get it
PHP >= 5.3.0 is needed to run the script. Change the first line to the right path (e. g. /usr/bin/php or /usr/bin/php5).
Checkout the repository directly into your music library (or just copy mkplaylists and chmod u+x mkplaylists). Alternatively, place the script wherever you like and change the $path_to_music_library within the config section accordingly.
By default, playlists are stored in the same folder. Change $path_for_playlist_storage if needed.
why
After some years with iTunes and Banshee I really had enough of super flat music libraries, touchpad scrolling and waiting times. Listening to music more and more felt like developing with powerful but bloated IDEs. I switched to cmus.
how
The root of my music library now contains some main folders, which can be genres or sources of music (like radio, friends, downloads).
So it looks like this, just to give an example:
./
../
80s/
90s+Dance/
Chanson/
Classic/
__DOWNLOADS/
Drum+and+Bass/
Electro+Indie/
Flamenco/
Jazz/
mkplaylists*
__RADIO/
README.mkd
Rock/
Trip-Hop/
World/
Each of those folders contains albums, compilations and single tracks as desired and will be represented by a playlist. After running ./mkplaylists the newly generated playlists can be opened with cmus via :load -p /path/to/your/playlist.pl (found in playlist view: 3).
With a cronjob running the script all left to do is choosing the right playlist within cmus after placing the music to where it belongs and waiting a while.
The script follows symlinks, so albums, compilations or single tracks can be placed to multiple playlists by creating symlinks. Remember to find . -type l | grep Artist before deleting files that might be referenced in other folders, and to backup single folders only with cp -RL or other dereference options with whichever tool you use. That in mind, sort your music directly on the file system without the headache of slow GUIs and limited playlist export options.
Generated playlists are a good base for manual selections. Deleting some of the generated playlists tracks with D and :save -p /path/to/your/playlist-finest.pl in cmus is the easiest way to do that.
cmus rocks. It's damn fast, supports scrobbling on last.fm and has vim keybindings.
Using folders and this little script makes it dead easy to use cmus, focus on music and keeping track of it.