Playlist with 80GB iPod and MusicBee

[Six66Mike]

I'm trying to figure out Playlists, and so far I haven't been able to figure it out.  I got a dynamic playlist today of about 13 songs created but it took 15 minutes and using the iPod to create playlists is a serious usability nightmare.

I found http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,28531.msg183513.html#msg183513 which indicates there's a problem with the way MusicBee creates/exports Playlists but doesn't say what the end solution is.  It seems the biggest problem is that you can create the playlist with MusicBee, it uses absolute file paths, and then renames everything when you export it which pretty much makes the playlist useless.

A line from the m3u playlist looks like this:

O:\Archive\0-9\311 (USA)\1995 - 311 (V0)\311 -04- All Mixed Up.mp3

But when you plug the iPod in and browse the path is:

G:\music\311\1995 - 311\04 - All Mixed Up.mp3

The export path on MusicBee is G:\Music\<Album Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Track#> - <Title>

Even if I change that format to something that remotely resembles what MusicBee can output to, the drive and path is still going to be wrong.

I'm not attached to this program at all.  Ultimately I will settle for ANYTHING that lets me create and manage playlists on my PC where it's clean, easy and user friendly instead of trying to go in & out of the database hundreds of times and adding songs to a playlist.  Any ideas?

[evilnick]

I'll take a stab at answering this despite not having used MusicBee myself 

The last post on the thread you linked to seems to indicate that the playlist files MusicBee generates refer to the path on the PC, but then when synchronising the files to the Rockbox player, it generates a new path.

Therefore, one way to keep using MusicBee would be (if this is even possible?!) to first synchronise the files to the RB device, and then create the playlists using *those* files (not the ones on the PC).
If this isn't possible, then perhaps you could try foobar2000. Again, using the files on the iPod itself.

Hope that helps.

[Six66Mike]

I had a feeling that's something I might have to do so I started to play with it briefly last night after midnight and gave up.  With the iPod attached and detected in MusicBee it's pretty bloody slow but after trying the playlist on the iPod this morning that was unimagineably worse.

I'll try doing the playlist direct on the iPod after a sync and see what happens this weekend.  I've tried foobar before a few times, never been able to get into it.