New User! How do I create a playlist?

Pi MusicBox
1

I have loaded MusicBox onto a RaspberryPi and it is running fine.

My music is on either the SD card or a USB memory stick. MusicBox can see the files OK and can play them. My problem is I do not know how to make a playlist and add it to the playlist section.

Thanks for any help.

Brian

2

Unfortunately there is currently no playlist management within Mopidy (the underlying music server).

But if you put some m3u playlist files in your playlist directory (/var/lib/mopidy/playlists) they will appear in the web interface’s playlist section. There are some examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U.

  • You can manually create the playlist files yourself (a bit of a pain for large playlists)

  • Try to use a program on another computer (a bit tricky since you’ll need to plug your USB stick into the other computer and then ensure the file paths of the items within the generated playlist are correct for musicbox).

  • Or I think there is the option of installing beets on your RaspberryPi and using that to create/manage your playlists. I don’t use it myself so but I know some people on here do (along with mopidy-beets or mopidy-beets-local).

3

Sorry to correct you, but there actually is playlist management in Mopidy. It’s just the case that

  • most Web clients simply ignore it
  • it’s mostly broken for local playlists in Mopidy v0.19; creating playlists, e.g. from the current tracklist, actually works, though.
1 Like
4

I didn’t think it was really worth mentioning the partially working playlist management features that few (if any) web clients try to use. But Mopidy is constantly improving and playlist management is on the roadmap so stay tuned!

5

Yeah, it’s not something I’d recommend for end users right now, I was just nitpicking here :wink:
BTW, the current Mopidy-Mobile beta already does support saving the tracklist as a local playlist, but that’s not something I’d recommend for general use, either…

6

I had a sneaky feeling that Mopidy-Mobile would be somehow using it! Someone was going to use it to replace the streams list functionality in musicbox-webclient but I think that has sadly fizzled out.

7

Thanks for you ideas, I will explore them. I am trying to setup a house music system for my wife and I would like it easy to use.

Brian

8

I had the same question. Check out my thread:

It has a link to a site where you can download a script that creates a playlist from a directory holding mp3 files.
In order for it to work properly you need to get the ffmpeg / ffprobe binaries for rpi.

I have created a wrapper script that calls the original script for each directory of a certain folder. In my case I call it for /music/MusicBox and it creates playlists for each subdirectory and puts them in /music.

10

I created a small python script to generate a playlist from tracks in your local mopidy database. More as an exercise in python programming (new to me). It works fine for my MusicBox setup so it might be of some use for other users.

11

Awesome! Thank you for this! Will test tonight.