A little workaround for slow-loading playlists (for Mediamonkey users)

rtl84

My M6 SL's not a bad music player but its unpolished firmware's a pain. I like to use playlists cuz it organises my music the way I want to, but:

1. the M6 typically freezes for a few seconds if you select a song to play within a long (>10 songs??) playlist.
2. the touch-sensitive strip sometimes accidentally registers a "click" and starts playing the song currently selected while i'm still scrolling through the playlist.

So having configured Mediamonkey (a good music manager btw) for a night i thought of a workaround for both problems - tell MM to physically sort files by playlists while syncing with the M6, and using the M6's browser to navigate your songs.

In your Mediamonkey configuration for the M6 while its plugged in, enter one of these into the "Sync tracks to:" field:

Method 1) To physically sort songs by Album Artist, Album, Track no and then title (this is what i'm using for the video):
\Music\<Playlist>\<Album Artist:10>-<Album:3><Track#>-<Title>

Method 2) To physically sort songs following the original order of your playlist:
\Music\<Playlist>\<Auto Number> <Artist:10>-<Title>

Where the ":10" limits the number of characters to 10 for the album artist, ":3" for 3 characters of the Album name. Of course you can change the numbers yourself if you want different or no character limits. I limit them because i want to be able to see as much of the song titles as possible, and yet have the files sorted nicely by artists (if you followed method 1 above) or according to the order of the original playlist (method 2).

Result: No freezing in playlists, double-tapping ensures u won't accidentally start playing an item while you're scrolling in a playlist!! Here's a youtube video illustrating the result. Hope the guide was of use to someone!

YouTube Video

Err0r

Wow, really nice writeup complete with a YouTube video! Thanks.

rtl84

You're welcome, i've wanted to make my playlists load quickly, just sharing the method to other playlist users.

I've also noticed that Mediamonkey can't export M3U playlists with unicode filenames in them properly (the titles are ok but the filenames become something like "???"), so the playlists it generated for my M6 didn't work for my japanese songs. But since i'm browsing the M6's file system directly now, the problem's gone.

pals

nice guide, but I don't get the difference between using this and foobars masstagger. the actual problem with the playlists isn't really solved. you just tag them in a special way and store them in a single folder. but what if I wished amy winehouse to appear on 3 different playlists? (e.g. jazz, rock, current_favs) then I either have to use the playlist option or store the file in 3 different locations, not really efficient, eh?

Fakin

yeah i think pals is right...i just have the freezing player problem if u use m3u playlists and it seems that u are simply using the m6´s browser to listen to your music...i never had a freezing player ´cause i used the browser...and of course there you use double tapping because you have your menu whether you wanna delete oda play the file.

tomek xx

So you're just using the browser,huh? That's nothing to do with MediaMonkey or something else^^ Everybody has this "special" future using the browser.

rtl84

Yup you guys are right, but it wasn't meant to be a FIX to the playlists, it's a WORKAROUND.. lol. I can't fix the firmware, i'm waiting for meizu to do that too.

rtl84

Well for a faithful reproduction of your playlists you would either have to do it manually or if you use a software like Mediamonkey it can be automated, which is why i'm sharing the configuration to do that. There's really nothing "special" about using the browser.

Meizzu

I didn't have to do like this at all, I just created maps, putted names on 'em.. like: Three days grace, in there I putted all their Music, renamed everything so it really was three days grace only. Working fine. Going into Browser and get to see all my maps there, easier than the other.. ^^