I recently started to explore other mac media players, iTunes has awesome functionality, but sadly it’s a pig memorywise, so my day to day music listening software has become VOX whose small footprint and clean UI hits all the right notes for me. I needed a simple way to create m3u playlist files (which are really just filelists saved with a ‘m3u’ file extension - every solution I could fine seemed overkill, most of the Automator workflows I found were predicated on you already having a iTunes playlist you wanted to export - I wanted just a clean ‘right/control click on folder full of music - ‘save as playlist’ kind of functionality.
Attached is such a workflow. I’ve used it successfully recursively on a folders containing 10,000 songs, and (although Automator takes a few seconds to actually startup) the action it self is pretty fast.
A few notes:
- It attempts to filters out the kind of CRUFT (.txt,.jpg,.png,.nfo) that you might have in a folder if you <cough>[acquire]</cough> music via some type of distribution network.
- It asks you what you want to name it, but by default it’s going to save it to your desktop.
- it includes subfolders as playlist items, VOX ignores these so I didn’t bother to exclude them - I suppose other players might actually choke on them so YMMV.
- The attached file is the full-fat editable automator workflow - you’ll probably want to save that as a finder plugin
I haven’t had any issues with it, let me know if you find it helpful.
DOWNLOAD: Create_M3U_Playlist.workflow
function friendlycase($title) {
$title = preg_replace( "/(?< =(?<!:|'s)\W)(A|An|And|At|For|In|Of|On|Or|The|To|With)(?=\W)/e", 'strtolower("$1")', ucwords(strtolower($title)));
return $title;
}
add_filter('the_title', 'friendlycase');
Short sweet and it works… so “HELLO SAUL…THIS IS MOTHRA” becomes “Hello Saul…this is Mothra” particularly handy when someone has a tendency to type in all caps. Painfully simple to add your own exclusionary words..
Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)
Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.
It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.
If you’ve been here before you may notice the site looks noticeably different - what was once dark red, now white, the visual challenge of reading blue off red is gone - in it’s place; miles and miles of white - don’t get used to it - as I get more and more familiar with butchering, torturing and spindling WordPress (I’m a hardcore EE guy usually) - it’s libel to get very strange up in this bitch. Until them… enjoy the white :)
Just a glamour photo of Maxx!, He’s a excellent Cat, handsome, loyal and a great player of ‘fetch’…
I make no claim of being a good photographer, I think 25 years as a designer has provided me a decent eye for composition and color, I’m also really practiced at photographing cats, any magic in these shots has to be attributed to the cats - I was just fortunate enough to get the camera focussed, and to press the shutter - it’s as simple as that - Both shot with a 50mm prime lens, which the more I use, the more I love.
