The MP3 Problem

I have years of collected MP3s. They are arranged in directories, some by band name, others by genre, and still others by 'playlist' (New Years, Birthday, etc). The trouble is I have numerous duplicates of many of my song files. I want to have one single source of MP3s added to various playlists. However I need those playlists copied to different directories so I can copy them to my phone. There are a few apps out there that do this but so far I have not found a tool to meet my needs.

I decided to build a simple playlist manager with my specific scenario in mind. Then I would cleanup file names and get all the ID3 tags set on ALL my song files and copy them into one directory. A massive 'nosql database' of songs. No duplicates. Any duplication would occur in the playlists, not in mp3 files themselves. I would then create playlists for whatever I want. These would be used to export their songs to whatever directory I want for copying to my phone etc.

I set to work. Creating a console app with super basic 'file browse' methods etc. It kept everything in a database and would copy files out to wherever. However it wasn't very friendly to use (Even for a console app lol), it was time consuming and I kept see weird bugs and odd behavior.

So I gave up.

Then I thought of a different tack to take. I would build it as a GUI app that essentially creates standard .pls files. However, even though it is basically a text editor, it is used more like a playlist manager. You create, or open a playlist and add songs to it. You can delete songs just by highlighting the text and deleting it. When you save the file it goes through and fixes the relative paths and rebuilds the entries for each file present in the text editor.

Then you can export the currently open playlist's files to another directory. This is all working so far! However I really need to update the relative path code to be able to walk up and into sibling directories etc. It currently can only handle child directories.

In the future I may update it to a more logical control like a grid or list, but the text field works fine for now.

I am currently cleaning up all my song file names and setting their ID3 tags. This is going to take a LONG time.