Board Thread:Hello! Creations/@comment-131168-20150909112638

So I've made a thing to help myself create playlists of arbitrary specifics.

The first step, and it was a doozy, was to attach the file names and locations of my H!P songs to their SongID in my DohBell database. It wasn't hard to get a list of all the songs from the database, or a list of files in my H!P directory, but pairing them together properly probably took a few hours. I did it in little chunks over a few days so I don't know about an exact time. But in the end I had a table with hundreds of them paired, like this on and on:



The next step was to set up a program that could do a big search and replace from all of the numbers to all of the file names. This is something I've done before, so really it was just a matter of sticking in these two new lists. Except that as it turns out... numbers have a lot in common! Replacing "20" will also affect numbers that were supposed to be "120" or "204" or "1209"; you get the picture. So I finagled it a bit so instead it worked on the numbers with # around them. A search/replace for #20# won't affect #120# or #204# or #1209#.

Then I needed a way to make it easy to take the output from one of my Dohbell searches in this format. Since it already needed to output every number to show the results anyway, it was pretty easy to make it also store the #modified# number in a list of its own, then hide it away in a spot at the bottom where it could be expanded, for easy copying.



That list, once copied, can be pasted into the search/replace program, and I get a result like this:



In this example, I had asked for a list of all Berryz Koubou instrumentals. Any I don't have it would detect as blank spots, and automatically get rid of those blank lines. So if I ask it for a list of all Heike Michiyo songs, it will give me a very short list since I just have her early Petit Best appearances.



More interesting possibilities would include making lists of all songs from a particular arranger (all Nagai Rui), all songs with a particular performer (all Yoshizawa Hitomi), or songs released within a certain span of time (calendar 2014).

I can then take one of those results, save it with a file name like MyBerryzInstrumentals.m3u8, and it can be loaded up into various programs--I'm a Winamp man myself. If I want to use it with my MP3 player I need a slightly different format, but converting to that is something I've done separately before and haven't (yet) built straight into this.



Considering DohBell isn't used by many people, and even fewer would want to spend time setting up a list of their files attached to SongIDs, I haven't given much practical thought to making it easy for multiple people to use with their own lists. But if anyone is actually interested, I can help them get started on setting up their list. 