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View Full Version : Tutorial: How to create a rolodex-style index using Smart playlists in Mezzmo



Paul
03-23-2010, 09:19 AM
Mezzmo is very flexible in the way it allows you to organize your media files. It comes with some pre-created playlists, but you can add your own to make it truly yours.

I will show you how to make a rolodex-style index out of your music artists. This is just a sample of what Mezzmo can do.

1) start Mezzmo
2) right-click on the Music playlist and select Create Playlist -> Playlist to create a normal playlist that will be a placeholder (root) for your index
3) in the dialog that comes up, name your placelist some list "Artist Index" and click OK
4) now right-click on the newly created playlist and select Create Playlist -> Smart Playlist
5) in the dialog that comes up, type in "A" as the playlist name, then make sure that "Match" is check and is set to "all"
6) in the combo boxes select: "Artist", "starts with" and type "a" (no quotes) in the edit box, click the "+" button to add another condition
7) in the new condition, select "File Type", "music" to limit your playlist to music items only and click OK to save
8) repeat steps 4-7 for all the letters and you've got a working, dynamic index of your music files by artist name

Enjoy! :cool:

Dennis


Update (April, 2013): Whilst this tutorial works fine, we recommend using "Group By First Letter" in Active Playlists to create "Rolodex"-style (A..Z) playlists. See http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread.php/476-Tutorial-How-to-create-a-rolodex-style-index-using-Smart-playlists-in-Mezzmo?p=22720#post22720 for an explanation and examples.

ronnyP
11-01-2010, 12:00 AM
Hi thanks for the tutorial, I have used it to make a rolodex-style index for my moveis and the letters A to Z is no problem but how do I make a index for movies that begins with numbers
like 24 or 48 hours.

Thanks :)
Ronny

Paul
11-01-2010, 08:40 AM
You'd probably want to set "match" to "any" and then add 10 conditions like "starts with" "0", "starts with" "1", etc...

Give that a try and see how you go. Let us know if it works or not :)

ronnyP
11-06-2010, 09:29 PM
I think it will be a bit messy, I would like to have a index called # or 0-9 and have all films that begins with numbers in that index. Is that possible or can you fix that in a future upgrade?
Thanks :)
Ronny

Paul
11-08-2010, 08:35 AM
Yes, that's exactly what I described above - you just need 10 conditions in one playlist, not 10 playlists, so you'll call the playlist "#" and add 10 conditions - one for each starting number.

ronnyP
11-09-2010, 02:20 AM
Ok, sorry too simple for me :o. It kind of work, I get the videofiles that starts with numbers but music files that starts with numbers slo shows up. I have tryed to set a condition "File Type", "video" but it don't work, the number sorting dissaperes.

Any suggestions? :confused:

Thanks :)
Ronny

Paul
11-09-2010, 08:59 AM
I understand the problem now. This will require some code changes, so I'll add this to development to-do list for a future update. Thanks for bringing this up!

jagmonty
01-22-2011, 03:35 PM
Hi and thanks for this tutorial. One question (or two) I have is is there any way to order the list that this playlist comes up with, for example, is it possible to order the Artists that start with A by Album? Then maybe even to extend that, could the sorted albums be in alphabetic order? It's mainly to have the songs grouped by album, but currently they are scattered.
Thanks.

Paul
01-24-2011, 08:50 AM
Not at the moment, but we'll add the ability to sort all playlists by various columns in a future version.

Ronald Gliot
02-04-2011, 03:34 AM
I have tried this and it actually works very nice. Yes it takes a few moments to add each condition, but it is not major. The only thing that would be nice is if you could enter ranges rather than keep adding conditions, but it didn't take much time anyhow. I get to play with this some more tomorrow as I have so many music files in each genre, and it appears Samsung C-6500 only handles a max of 1k, I have to parse up the files based on a couple of conditions; genre and alpha, so we'll see how that goes!

Ronald Gliot
02-10-2011, 06:50 AM
I am having an issue where I need to split up some my genres as there are too many songs and it exceeds the Samsung buffer limit of 1k songs. e.g. I want to sort be gender Rock and then a range of (10) albums starting with sequential lettering so I can parse the entire genre into 3 or 4 playlists. I cannot find a way to do this with Smar or Active playlists and it appears I may have to manually set up playlists. Is there a way to make this happen by Smart or Active? I have played with it quite a bit with no success except for only genre and 1 alpha. Can ranges be entered into conditions? Also, home come "songs" isn't a criteria I could use? I would love to do "Genre" and "songs" beginning with A-F, etc. Actually, overall I would love if the sorting capabilites mirrored MS Media Player.

Paul
02-10-2011, 07:52 AM
Ranges are not available at the moment, but it's planned soon. We'll be adding more keywords/conditions as well, so keep the suggestions coming in!

Ronald Gliot
02-11-2011, 01:47 AM
Awesome.....in the situation I have, the only way I have found where I could parse my Rock collection of .mp3s was to create (4)playlists representing Rock and alpha ranges in MS Media Player and then do linked playlists in Mezzmo. I could figure out no way other than manually putting every song into a playlist in Mezzmo which would have been tedious. MS Media allows me to sort by song title, and genre which then put the alpha char. heading above each section. I could then click on the alpha to select all within that letter, then copy to the playlist. Once that was done, I set up the link playlist and I had what I needed. I am trying to figrue our many angles. I think another thing that would help on Smart playlist is beyond "all" or "any" might be a kind of "or" or "then if" kind of thing. If I could do a Smart where all must have a specifice genre, and then be able to add multiple alpha characters as a "start with", then I could have acheived what I needed. I could only do Genre with one Alpha character using "All". Use of "any" ignored the genre statement and picked all songs of all genres with the requested started alpha character. I really like the Smart feature, and with a few more condition options I think this could be stellar. As it is, I am getting pretty well organized, as I have learned that depending on the case, you may have to use Smart, link, or Active and I am using all 3. Active seems to be almost the most cumbersome for manual use as your orignal library almost has to be arranged in folders of genre or the like. In my case I organize the folders as MS does, simply in public sharing folders by artist name.

RMatic
03-05-2011, 04:17 PM
I created the "Rolodex-style" index and it worked great. However, the list produced under each index playlist is an unsorted list of songs. Is there any way I can get a list of individual artist names under the index (and further, albums belonging to that artist under that)?

Like so: Artist Index -> P -> Pink Floyd -> Dark Side of the Moon -> <list of songs in album>

mdp123
07-23-2011, 06:45 PM
I created the "Rolodex-style" index and it worked great. However, the list produced under each index playlist is an unsorted list of songs. Is there any way I can get a list of individual artist names under the index (and further, albums belonging to that artist under that)?

Like so: Artist Index -> P -> Pink Floyd -> Dark Side of the Moon -> <list of songs in album>

I agree - It would be nice to be able to organize the playlist like that, even though I would prefer it like this: Artist Index -> P -> Pink Floyd -> <list of songs.
By the way, I think what RMatic describes is possible with Serviio as it makes an index under Artist.
Nice if it would be possible to do with Mezzmo as well.

Paul
07-25-2011, 08:56 AM
Sorry, it appears no one has replied to RMatic's original post.

In any case, we'll be working on adding more flexibility to playlists for future versions, so I believe this should be possible later.

yellowsub
08-21-2011, 11:38 AM
HI, I have all my music in \Artist\Album\songs format and want to create a playlist under the folders playlist that has all artists beginning with i.e. A\Artist\album\songs or B\Artist\Album\Songs.
When I view the folders on my TV it takes forever to scroll through the all the individual artist folders and having a list of all A artists etc would speed this up.
Is the above possible and how would do this? Thanks, excellent product.

Paul
08-22-2011, 08:44 AM
Hi,

At the moment that's not possible, unfortunately, but this is planned as a future feature - you'd be able to limit active and smart playlists, so then you could create an active hierarchy to show titles only starting with 'A' (for example).

qupncy
09-05-2011, 11:06 PM
Mezzmo is very flexible in the way it allows you to organize your media files. It comes with some pre-created playlists, but you can add your own to make it truly yours.

I will show you how to make a rolodex-style index out of your music artists. This is just a sample of what Mezzmo can do.

1) start Mezzmo
2) right-click on the Music playlist and select Create Playlist -> Playlist to create a normal playlist that will be a placeholder (root) for your index
3) in the dialog that comes up, name your placelist some list "Artist Index" and click OK
4) now right-click on the newly created playlist and select Create Playlist -> Smart Playlist
5) in the dialog that comes up, type in "A" as the playlist name, then make sure that "Match" is check and is set to "all"
6) in the combo boxes select: "Artist", "starts with" and type "a" (no quotes) in the edit box, click the "+" button to add another condition
7) in the new condition, select "File Type", "music" to limit your playlist to music items only and click OK to save
8) repeat steps 4-7 for all the letters and you've got a working, dynamic index of your music files by artist name

Enjoy! :cool:

Dennis
Hi, i followed the above instructions and managed to create a decent playlist. I was just wondering how would i get mezzmo to import the seperate srt files for each of the videos into the rolodex-style playlist?
cheers

Paul
09-06-2011, 08:57 AM
Hi, i followed the above instructions and managed to create a decent playlist. I was just wondering how would i get mezzmo to import the seperate srt files for each of the videos into the rolodex-style playlist?
cheers
SRT files are matched against the actual file, so it doesn't matter which playlist the file is in, SRTs will be picked up by Mezzmo and delivered to the device (if it supports it), regardless of how you get to the file.

qupncy
09-06-2011, 09:52 AM
SRT files are matched against the actual file, so it doesn't matter which playlist the file is in, SRTs will be picked up by Mezzmo and delivered to the device (if it supports it), regardless of how you get to the file.

Hey thanks for that. I got to test it out last night and it works well, although i only want video files to be sorted that are from a specific folder.. I.e E:\Movies and sort them from A - Z. Mezzmo however picks up all the video files on my computer. Is there away to make Mezzmo only sort the video files from 1 specific folder? i tried the file name condition but then Mezzmo doesn't find any movies..
thanks

Paul
09-06-2011, 09:55 AM
What did you enter in the file name condition? Can you please post a screenshot of one of those playlists' properties and I'll see if there's anything wrong.

qupncy
09-06-2011, 10:15 AM
What did you enter in the file name condition? Can you please post a screenshot of one of those playlists' properties and I'll see if there's anything wrong.
thanks for the quick reply, the link is: http://imageshack.us/g/847/unlednl.jpg/

Paul
09-06-2011, 10:21 AM
Thanks for the screenshot. Try changing the file path to "starts with" and see if that works. When you have "is", it means an exact match, which in case of file paths will not work, since it will try to match a single file.

qupncy
09-06-2011, 10:30 AM
Thanks for the screenshot. Try changing the file path to "starts with" and see if that works. When you have "is", it means an exact match, which in case of file paths will not work, since it will try to match a single file.
Yeah it worked. Thanks for your help, much appreciated.
Quick question, any idea on when the next major update might be?
cheers

*update*
i just checked the 0-9 playlist and that still seems to be grabbing videos from other drives and folders, would you know why that is?
thanks

Paul
09-06-2011, 10:37 AM
Yeah it worked. Thanks for your help, much appreciated.
Quick question, any idea on when the next major update might be?
cheers

I'm glad it's working :) Sorry, can't give an official ETA on any major releases. The next minor update should be out within the next couple of days.



*update*
i just checked the 0-9 playlist and that still seems to be grabbing videos from other drives and folders, would you know why that is?
thanks
Does it have the same attributes? Does it use a "match any"? If it does, then any condition is matched, so that'll explain it. The only way to fix it at the moment is to actually create separate lists for each digit. We'll be allowing more flexibility in creating smart playlists in one of the future versions, so then you'll be able to create various combinations of conditions.

qupncy
09-06-2011, 10:42 AM
yeah its 'matched to any' because if i set it to 'match all' wouldn't it look for file names that start with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc? all at the start of the name?

Paul
09-06-2011, 10:44 AM
yeah its 'matched to any' because if i set it to 'match all' wouldn't it look for file names that start with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc? all at the start of the name?
Yes, that's why you need to create discrete playlists for each of those digits (at the moment, as I said in the future you'll be able to combine things better).

qupncy
09-06-2011, 10:49 AM
Oh ok well i look forward to the next few updates lol
thanks for your help

Bodders-11
02-05-2012, 01:39 AM
A quick (dirty?) way of solving the issue of items that have Numbers in their title (e.g. 2012, 3:10 To Yuma) is to (ab)use the Album field.
1. Prefix the field with a non-alphabetic character like '#'
2. Create a Smart Playlist named '#' or '0-9'
3. The rules are as before, but use '<Album> <starts with> <#>'

Because the Title is unchanged, the displayed list should omit the '#' character.

JohnM
02-26-2012, 10:37 AM
I chose to use the Album Artist field to do this. It worked so well that I extended it to identify sets. So all of the batman movies have batman in the field. Then I create a smart playlist named batman that looks for a video with batman in the field.

smitbret
09-20-2012, 04:30 AM
I created the "Rolodex-style" index and it worked great. However, the list produced under each index playlist is an unsorted list of songs. Is there any way I can get a list of individual artist names under the index (and further, albums belonging to that artist under that)?

Like so: Artist Index -> P -> Pink Floyd -> Dark Side of the Moon -> <list of songs in album>

Been almost a year and a half since this was requested and more than a year since we had last heard that playlist functionality would be updated. Any progress on these fronts? As it is, using Smart Playlists for my music library is pointless since it won't categorize by artist and/or album.

Paul
09-20-2012, 04:27 PM
Hi smitbret,

Once we get Mezzmo v3.0 released (with new subtitling and URL streaming features), then we will certainly be looking into these and other features.

smitbret
09-20-2012, 11:51 PM
Hi smitbret,

Once we get Mezzmo v3.0 released (with new subtitling and URL streaming features), then we will certainly be looking into these and other features.

Cool, I will watch for it, then.

jbinkley60
11-28-2012, 08:20 PM
Is there a coming feature that would allow us to strip off words at the beginning like "The" and 'A" so that so many movies don't end up under A and T because the titles begin with A or The ? Right now I have 236 videos that end up under T with over 80% because they start with The. I could go through and edit each title to remove The but I'd prefer to see a simpler approach.

Paul
11-29-2012, 03:32 PM
Good idea. We'll add that to the list when we implement our 'rolodex' feature.

JohnM
11-30-2012, 04:08 PM
I would suggest that you make it a user configurable list. That way it will be able to work with every language.

Paul
11-30-2012, 04:14 PM
That makes sense. Thanks, JohnM.

Paul
03-28-2013, 04:55 PM
We have just added 'Group By First Letter' into Active playlists for Mezzmo v3.1. This lets you group your files, genres, artists, albums, etc. by their first letter to create easy-to-browse 'Rolodex'-style playlists. This is useful when you have many files, genres, artists, albums, etc.

How to use 'Group By First Letter' in Active Playlists


Click Create Playlist -> Active Playlist to display the Active Playlist dialog.
You can use the Group By First Letter keyword to create a 'Rolodex'-style playlist where keywords and files are grouped by their first letter. The Group By First Letter can precede any keyword and this tells Mezzmo to group the results for that keyword into A..Z sub playlists for convenient browsing. Adding Group By First Letter at the end of the keyword hierarchy tells Mezzmo to group the list of files by their first letter.


Example 1:

[+] Group By First Letter

Restrict to Video files

This will list all video files grouped by their first letter (A..Z) of the video files' titles.

Example 2:

[+] Group By First Letter


[+] Artist



[+] Album

Restrict to Music files

This will list all music artists grouped by their first letter (A..Z). Under each grouping will be the albums for each artist. Under each album will be the music tracks for each album.

Example 3:

[+] Group By First Letter


[+] Genre



[+] Group By First Letter




[+] Album





[+] Group By First Letter

Restrict to Music files

This will list all music genres grouped by their first letter (A..Z). Under each grouping will be the albums grouped by their first letter (A..Z). Under each album will be tracks grouped by the track's titles (A..Z).