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

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

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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...2720#post22720 for an explanation and examples.

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

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 :)

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

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.

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

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!

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.

Not at the moment, but we'll add the ability to sort all playlists by various columns in a future version.

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!