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Products => Other Products, including computer memory => : achansonjr April 30, 2009, 09:56:12 AM

: LT-H90LAN & LS-WS500GL Media Playlist Issue
: achansonjr April 30, 2009, 09:56:12 AM
   

Hi all,

 

I have purchased a Linkstation Mini and a Linktheater HD.  I am wanting to get it so that I can create and save playlists that I can play from my Linktheater.  I have the Linktheater talking to the Linkstation and can play music.  There were even three playlists that existed previously when I moved my media over that work from the "Playlists" option under Browse Media on the Linktheater.

 

However I am having a problem getting any new playlists added.  The playlists that work are of an M3U format, IE created in Winamp.  There is no special format to these playlists as they utilize the \ character to denote directories, have the standard playlist meta data and reside in various levels of the directory structure from the songs themselves.

 

For example:

One playlist is directly in the folder with the MP3's that it references.

So for the file Playlist1 it is at the same directory level as the songs.

 

Another playlist is in a folder above the songs.  So for the Directory structure:

Artist\Album\song.mp3

The playlist is in the Artist directory and references the songs in a manner of:

Album\song.mp3

 

So this shows that there is not really an issue with the direction of the slash as some other posts have indicated.

 

So my question is this, I have created playlists all over the directory strucutre, from being directly in the same folder as the songs it is attempting to play, to the one directory removed method, all the way up to the root shared media directory.  I cannot no matter what I do, "Refresh Media List", "Reinitialize Media Database" or even restarting the NAS, get the playlists to be available to the link theater.  I have gone through everything I can think of to try and get the NAS to start feeding those playlists to my Linktheater.

 

I have even gone through the "browse shared folders" option on the Linktheater, and the playlists will not show up as even raw files.

 

What can I do to get this fixed?

 

I would also like to see about a potential modification to the software.  It would be nice if I turn on my Linktheater that I can set it to automatically start playing a playlist I have preselected.  This way I don't have to navigate through the TV interface and tell it to start playing.  I would like to use it as a basic digital media receiver that can just start playing music when it is turned on.

 

Thanks for your time,

Clint Hanson

: Re: LT-H90LAN & LS-WS500GL Media Playlist Issue
: achansonjr May 01, 2009, 12:19:33 PM
   

Well after much trial and error I have got this resolved.

 

The issue is that the LinkTheater or LinkStation (Not sure really which one is responsible for filtering out bad playlists) requires the playlist to be in a certain format.

 

When you save a playlist from Winamp it saves the playlist in this format.

 

#EXTM3U

#EXTINF:231,The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

\MP3\The White Stripes\Elephant\01 - Seven Nation Army.mp3

#EXTINF:183,The White Stripes - Black Math

\MP3\The White Stripes\Elephant\02 - Black Math.mp3

 

The #EXTM3U information is extended info that the playlist can use to display information about the song without actually having to go and inspect the m3u tag of the song.  Sooo what I did was delete any line that had #EXTM3U or #EXTINF in it.  So now I have a file that has only:

 

\MP3\The White Stripes\Elephant\01 - Seven Nation Army.mp3

\MP3\The White Stripes\Elephant\02 - Black Math.mp3

 

I can now refresh on the Linkstation Media server and my playlists show up.

 

They behave kind of wonky.  If you press play on the playlist itself it will begin playing all the songs and you can skip and go back like a regular album.  However if you go into a playlist, and play a song, it will not let you skip, it will just not do anything else once the song is done playing.  Not sure if this is proper behavior but /shrug I am just happy that I am able to save music to the darn thing.

 

I have had the best luck with winamp creating the playlists, but I have to manually go through and delete the lines.  You need to save it as an m3u playlist then go through the manual pain in the butt of removing the lines.  I am looking into finding something that will remove them, or heck I may just write something myself.

 

Hope this helps anyone else out there with the same issue.

 

Developers!!! I have a feature request.  Please let me pick a default playlist to start playing once I turn on the box.  I have this set up to a dual room receiver and would like the ability to turn on the dual room feature, start the LinkTheater and just have it start playing songs.  Thanks.

 

Hope this helps,

Clint