Current version: 1.01
This is a little application that i made in .NET using the library SharePodLib that can generate playlist for RockBox from the Smart Playlists and Normal Playlist in a iPod.
It reads all the Smart and Normal Playlists stored in the iPod generated with iTunes, and it let you select which ones you want to make rockbox compatible.
Then click the "Generate Playlist for Rockbox" button and it creates a playlist for each one with the same name in *.m3u8 format, so it can be read from rockbox. The playlists created are stored in the "Playlists" folder in the iPod (that folder is created if doesn't exist), because this is the folder that rockbox "look" when you select to view the Playlist Catalog.
I want to make clear, that actually it doesn't "convert" the ipod playlist, but makes a copy in *.m3u format and put it in a Playlist folder in your ipod. It doesn't modify in any way the iPod Database or the original playlist.
The iPod must be connected before executing the program, because the first thing it does, is to try to detect an iPod connected.
Because the music files are stored by iTunes in a "particular way", the path files in the playlist generated looks like this:
/iPod_Control/Music/F00/PJOU.mp3
/iPod_Control/Music/F43/EQTS.mp3
/iPod_Control/Music/F49/EJBX.mp3
/iPod_Control/Music/F13/IUDV.mp3
This is not a problem when you are playing the playlist, because rockbox reads the metadata (ID3 tag) of the music files and shows the correct artist and song name. But when you are exploring the playlist content, you aren't able to know the real song names... the only thing you see is:
1.PJOU
2.EQTS
3.EJBX
4.IUDV
But that issue have a solution. There is a M3U Extended Format that stores the length of the song and the title and artist name. A description of Extended M3U can be found here.
iPod/iTunes to RockBox Playlist Converter creates the playlists in this extended format, but RockBox still needs to understand the M3U Extended Format and show the names correctly. Fortunately there is a patch made by Xinlu Huang that does exactly that. I hope that that patch be accepted soon and integrated in to the code of RockBox. The patch is FS#7652
The iPod must be connected before executing the program, because the first thing it does, is to try to detect an iPod connected.
I recommend that iTunes be closed and it needs .NET framework 2.0 to run (can be downloaded from here).
Because the music files are stored by iTunes in a "particular way", the path files in the playlist generated looks like this:
/iPod_Control/Music/F00/PJOU.mp3
/iPod_Control/Music/F43/EQTS.mp3
/iPod_Control/Music/F49/EJBX.mp3
/iPod_Control/Music/F13/IUDV.mp3
This is not a problem when you are playing the playlist, because rockbox reads the metadata (ID3 tag) of the music files and shows the correct artist and song name. But when you are exploring the playlist content, you aren't able to know the real song names... the only thing you see is:
1.PJOU
2.EQTS
3.EJBX
4.IUDV
But that issue have a solution. There is a M3U Extended Format that stores the length of the song and the title and artist name. A description of Extended M3U can be found here.
iPod/iTunes to RockBox Playlist Converter creates the playlists in this extended format, but RockBox still needs to understand the M3U Extended Format and show the names correctly. Fortunately there is a patch made by Xinlu Huang that does exactly that. I hope that that patch be accepted soon and integrated in to the code of RockBox. The patch is FS#7652
Download: iPod-iTunes to RockBox Playlist Converter v1.01
Hope it can help you and if you use it i'll be glad to receive some feedback. If you want source code just mail me.
Changelog:
1.01 - 9 february 2008
- this characters : \ / | * ? < > " are not compatible with the filesystem, so now it's replaced by and underscore (_) if is present in the playlist filename.
- Added a link to webpage.
1.0 - 19 december 2007
- Initial release.
3 comments:
Hey, thanks for the playlist converter! I just used it on XPSP2 and my iPod 4g it worked fine, except for 1 playlist had a ":" character in the playlist title and caused the converter to crash. I removed the ":" and it worked fine. Thanks again!
Thanks for the feedback. I made some changes to avoid the problem with some characters in the playlist name... version 1.01 is now released.
Thank you SOOO much! It worked like a charm! As much as I loved RockBox, it was useless without my already created playlists. And entirely to large to manually recreate. I had no troubles and it converted my lists in the blink of an eye. A thousand Thank Yous!
Post a Comment