OT: WMP playlists

"SteveG" wrote

Word offers a "Replace All" function. I presume OpenOffice does as well, so if you have either you shouldn't have a problem.

Geo

Open them in the text editor of your choice. Notepad is included in Windows.

Then Find and Replace the current drive letter (You quote E:) with the new drive letter ("Whatever it is":)

But you already know that way. ;-)

It's harder to do all the playlists in one go, as you need to write a script to open each playlist in an appropriate program, do the Find & Replace, then save and close the file. By the time you've written and debugged a script, it's possibly easier just to do one at a time over a week or two.

Possibly a daft question, but does anybody know if there's still an equivalent of the "Assign" DOS command available? Just assign the new drive the letter E, and all your stuff will work without any changes.

Of course, on Linux, it'd be the work of less than a week to write a program using grep.....

Put the new hard drive in as E:

A few minutes with find, sed and xargs on linux would do it, but you'd have to install linux first ;-)

If you're desperate I could run them through on my linux box, but you'd have to create a zip file with the current folder heirarchy containing the wpl files in the right place, perhaps if your zip programme can be told to recursively add a directory tree (your whole MP3 collection) but exclude all files other than .wpl files? Then I could unzip them, sed them, re-zip them and you could extract the files over your current heirarchy (after testing it first!).

See if you can find a way to do it yourself first though in case it happens again.

That may not be possible, IME, especially if the new drive is external.

Ah-ha....

Tells how to assign a new letter to a drive. So, assign the new drive as E: Problem (maybe) solved.

SNIP

An eureka moment ... why didn't I think of re-assigning the new drive as "E"? Cheers John, that'll take about 5 minutes as opposed to 5 weeks to alter all the playlists :-)

Sheer genius :-)

Thanks for the offer, Ian, but that sounds like a lot of hard work ... and I've never been one for hard work (of any kind) :-)

Move existing E: to a vacant letter first.

What I used to do when I was forced to use Windows was name drives and refer to them by name rather than by letter, I always hated the naming bit with Windows.

Another thing you can do is mount a hard disc as a directory on your current hard disc, e.g. /music or something, then anything that goes in there is written to the new disc. That's the unix way of doing it.

Select Random and chill out, life is to short for lists.

;-)

Lee D

Or go back to CDs, I resurrected mine recently, not listed to CDs for ages, great to hear music almost properly again! Even bought some.

textpad

select all playlist files / right click : open with textpad

search / replace (in all open files)

save all

works fine till you realise you have your kids music stored on the same drive

ugh!

Or Cygwin.

Installation is painless. Mastering UNIX is not so easy, though. OTOH, if you have the Land-Rover mentality, where your vehicle is just a collection of random components bolted together, and good tools are something to be collected and appreciated you might find yourself abandoning the Windows way.

find . -iname "*.wpl" -print0 | xargs -0l sed -i 's/E:\//D:\//'

Cor, you youth! Vinyl's the way to go for real listening pleasure, and there is something vaguely 'Series Land Rover' about the whole business.

I recently dug all my old records out of storage and rather disturbingly had to explain to our 7 year old what they were. Anyhow, she was introduced to their delights with 'Houses of the Holy' and is now a convert, apart from the fact that she can't dance to them without the needle skipping....

AC.

I did say *almost* properly, I have a vinyl deck too, and yes it is very good, a cheap deck can disgrace some expensive digital gear as long as you don't mind the pop-crack!

Thanks for all the suggestions folks. Job done ... simply played around with the drive letters until I got the new hard drive as E

I can listen to music again :-)

Listening to some of my collection of vinyl at the weekend on the Wurlitzer,

80 records, 160 sides to play. Can't beat them, and it has the advantage that the vinyl is covered and stored vertical on edge so less trouble with dust etc.

Martin