Fucking Microsoft.

You know, the one thing that makes me mad about women is when they don't know about Linux. I mean, Windows XP is just not a stable environment!

Yeah, he was the first one kicked off.

So, seriously, what does a playlist do?

Is that a serious question? It tells a media player where to locate files, and in what order, as well as containing useful metadata so that the player doesn't have to open the files to get it itself. It is useful for organizing things. I, for instance, have a master playlist containing everything I have, and make subsidiary playlists when working on mixes or radio shows or whatnot. Some people have more, for accompanying different activities, iykwim, or moods or whatnot.

To think that I used to be able to get a list of all the filenames, in order, from a playlist with the simple command 'egrep '\.(mp3)|(ogg)|(wav)|(flac)$' "$1" | egrep -v "^#"', the better to auto-convert them to .wavs, the better to burn them to a CD, and that I never will be so innocent again!

Yeah, I was serious; I was confused by the shareability, because I don't understand how my playlist, which points to a folder on a windows drive would be useful to you, with your songs on whatever.

Yeah, he was the first one kicked off.

Thanks for ruining it for me.

Just passing it on.

the simple command 'egrep '\.(mp3)|(ogg)|(wav)|(flac)$' "$1" | egrep -v "^#"'

The simple trip to the moon.

Point-n-shoot.

4 - I never will be so innocent again! s/b I cannot bother to learn XPath.

I've actually used XPath for some stupid greasemonkey things. Is there a commandline xpath utility thing, similar to grep but for xml documents? (Actually, since the document is structured with each element on its own line, I could still use grep for things between <location> elements and decode the %-escapes, for which there presumably is some commandline itility.

I could swear I saw this here in the last week. "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, it's because you aren't using enough."

Though honestly I do think that having to use XPath to query your music playlist is a little ridiculous. It's overkill.

I also think that this, from the format specification, is kind of ridiculous: The function of a playlist is not to communicate metadata about the composer, song title, etc. But it completely is. Without already having the metadata in a large playlist, going through it becomes very cumbersome, as the application has to open a bunch of files, or make a bunch of internet connections, in order to get the data itself.

I think XML::XPath installs a command line tool called (appropriately) xpath.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think I know, I'll use regular expressionsXML. Now they have two problems. — Jamie Xawinski.

That was an awfully long and gobbledygooked-laden post just to pimp your personal blog, w-lfs-n.

bah, everyone knows that amarok is the one true linux music player

in other news, what real complaints (other than nonxmlity) exist for m3u playlists?

I've always sort of liked XPath. XSLT is the thing I've never bothered to learn, and of which I'm consequently terrified.

I'm glad 15 has "regular expressions" crossed out, 'cuz they're GREAT (and Turing-complete!).

U guys should try iTunes. It is sweet.

(and Turing-complete!)

What? Really? You can't even balance parentheses!

I think XML::XPath installs a command line tool called (appropriately) xpath.

It's completely not up to the task of parsing 13K document, and clutters its output with all sorts of extraneous crap. Yay! And apparently different libraries have different standards for … well, I don't even know what, but to get the same results that "//location/text()" gives for XML::XPath, you need to do "//{http://xspf.org/ns/0/}location/text()" with ElementTree, and I'm still not sure how to work it with 4suite. Something to do with this, I suppose.

Fuck nerds!

As part of my getting over my fear of admitting ignorance, can you explain what, if any, functionality I'm missing out on by using iTunes to organize and playback stored audio files? If the answer isn't about functionality, is it just about the disadvantages of using a GUI (in particular windowsXP) in general? Something else (possibly efficient usage of processing resources)?

I'm really torn over whether this or the hosting post is the most boring unfogged post ever.

22 - I know people don't think iTunes' MP3 encoder is as nice as some other ones, such as LAME. More importantly, you don't get to have arguments about the niceties of demanding namespace binding in your XPath processing!

So far no such argument has occurred here, either.

XML? Fuck that shit. PABST BLUE RIBBON!

I have since discovered that if I put in entities in the &#nnn; form, things show up correctly.

This is one of the funniest Linux stories I have ever come across. (Hey, girls, wait till you hear this one!) How many songs are you talking about?

This post put a huge smile on my face. I posted something in a similar vein in my LJ when I was teaching myself ruby; it's nice to know that I'm not the only one that succumbs to the urge to rant sarcastically about technology issues from time to time.

22: iTunes won't run on Linux. It also, although I'm less sure of this these days, will detract from your geek cred. Other than that, if it's not pissing you off, don't worry about it.

But yeah, fuck XML. I can just about make ElementTree do what I want for the most basic of XML APIs, which is luckily all I need it for, but anything as sophisticated as SOAP, well... best of luck to whomever needs to dig around in that stuff. Those who do so voluntarily get a raised eyebrow.

18: That's not true, as regexps are computable by DFAs -- though they're usually computed by NFAs in practice -- and hence are significantly weaker than a Turing machine. In fact, IIRC they're pretty close to the bottom rung of anything considered "computable". Even if you pump up regexps with fancy backtracking and the like, I'm pretty sure you still end up well below Turing equivalency.

My own music holy grail is a song database that can search by an individual musician and generate a playlist of every song on which that musician appears. For instance, "Eric Clapton" would produce a list of all of the appropriate Yardbirds, Cream, solo, Derek, Blind Faith, Howlin' Wolf London Sessions, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", etc.

If you'd be kind enough to invent that, I'd be very grateful. I'll even give you a dollar.

32: that doesn't need invention, it needs very thorough and boring cataloguing.

How many songs are you talking about?

29532.

24: there is a script available for importing to iTunes with lame, if you are going to use .mp3 it is probably worthwhile.

30: I suspect anyone who's `geek cred' is based on things like which mp3 player they use doesn't have much geek cred anyway (unless they wrote it, in haskell or something).

31: You're right, I got my factoid wrong. PCREs are Turing-complete, but without those added features "classic" REs aren't.

Recursive matching? Insanity!