Use divider files to organize albums in XMMS

Mar 24, '04 11:14:00AM

Contributed by: c15zyx

While XMMS doesn't have heirarchical playlists (a real bane to those who organize by album), you can add some organization by creating spaces or dividers between playlist items. This is most useful when sorting by filepath and filename (default). I have my untagged vorbis collection organized by "artistorvarious - album/trackno. artist - title.ogg" and this helps prevent the album items from running into each other (screenshot).

To do this, create an empty file and encode it into a format that XMMS understands. Then you can rename it as " " for a space or "-----" for a divider, or something similar. Then you can stick it in the album folder and depending on how you named it, will go in front or behind all the folder items in the playlist. For example:

 $ touch dummyfile
 $ lame -r dummyfile " "
for a spacer, or:
 $ touch dummyfile
 $ oggenc -r -o "-----------" dummyfile
for a separator.

One interesting side effect of this is that the characters of these filenames will flash briefly as XMMS skips over them in the playlist, so in the shot above as it jumps between albums the new album name flashes for a second. Also, if you want to start playing an album from the beginning, you don't have to search for the first song, you can just double-click on the album title or spacers and they will be skipped over, leading to the first track of the album.

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