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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: Portable Playlists
Situation: music library on a USB drive, switched between Mac and Win machines with the appropriate versions of VDJ on them. So far, so good.

Problem: Providing easy access to curated collections from the library, created outside VDJ.

Solution 1: Set up folders alongside the library, one for each collection, containing hard links to the desired files. This works well, and is portable, BUT search within VDJ reports multiple instances of the same track, and if one is played the other instances don't get updated with last played statistics.

Solution 2: Set up .m3u playlists for each collection. This would (I presume) solve the multiple instances issues, but VDJ requires each entry in each playlist to be an absolute path (not relative), and the path formats are different between Mac and Win file systems. I think I can solve this by including both formats in the playlists (half of which will be invalid for either Mac or Win), but for Win the path requires a drive letter and that may be inconsistent when plugged into a Win system (Mac uses the drive label).

Anybody got any clever ideas? Relative paths would help!
 

geposted Fri 02 Aug 24 @ 11:52 pm
AdionPRO InfinityCTOMember since 2006
Relative paths in m3u should work too
 

geposted Sat 03 Aug 24 @ 5:32 am
Okay, thanks. I'll have another go. Relative didn't seem to work, but it could be that I used \ rather than / and upset the Mac path. More experimenting required, I'll report back.
 

geposted Sat 03 Aug 24 @ 6:37 am
szemekPRO InfinityMember since 2019
This is only an idea, but I think with Online Source plugin (https://virtualdj.com/wiki/Plugins_SDKv8_Example7.html) it should be possible to implement this.

Tracks for Online Source plugin have paths with format
netsearch://plugin-<PluginName>/<PathToTrack>
By setting "root" folder in plugin configuration, <PathToTrack> will be relative.

The major drawback of this approach is necessity of compiling plugin for macOS and Windows.
 

geposted Sat 03 Aug 24 @ 8:09 am
Actually I've found relative paths work... but only once.

Plug the stick into the Mac, and the playlists work fine, but VirtualDJ proceeds to re-write them with absolute paths (and track info which it gets wrong), so the playlist file is no longer valid for the PC installation.

How do I stop VirtualDJ over-writing my files?
 

geposted Thu 22 Aug 24 @ 6:21 pm
Since my previous post I have been completely unable to reproduce my results. Everything I have tried ends up with an (apparently) empty .m3u file in VDJ on the Mac, while the same file works just fine on the PC. I've tried using backslash and forward slash file path separators, the only thing I can think of now is that the Mac doesn't like .. (up one directory level).

Can anyone tell me the syntax requirements for a .m3u line on a Mac?
 

geposted Fri 13 Sep 24 @ 11:40 pm
I don't know wether it is working or not.
But I know that serato writes the crates in its serato directory on the drive with the relative filepaths. Since VDJ can read the crates/cues from serato. you might use this as a workaround.
Export VDJ Playlist from the external as m3u with relative filepaths.
open serato and drag that m3u in.
A crate should be created and a _serato_ directory on that drive.
open VDJ and use the browser to the crates section.
I mean this is not ideal, but it might work on win and mac then.
 

geposted Sat 14 Sep 24 @ 7:33 am
The problem with that is I have very limited access to the Mac so have to prepare things off-line to test quickly when I do get access. I just wish I hadn't deleted the files I tried some weeks ago which triggered VDJ to read them and then over-write with its own version!
 

geposted Sat 14 Sep 24 @ 8:59 am
did you switch settagsauto to no in options? did you try that option?
 

geposted Sun 15 Sep 24 @ 11:30 am