Making Playlists for TiVo

Whether you are an Apple fan or not iTunes is a good program. I use iTunes to help me organize my music and ensure the tag information is correct. I also use it to make my playlists. The playlists are generated by an Excel program I created. I am giving the steps here but the program is not bullet-proof. I may post it later when I make it presentable.

1. Create a playlist in iTunes.
2. Right-click on the playlist and select "Export Song List..."
3. Select a name and location for the file.
4. Open Playlist application (Excel program).
5. On the Info page make sure the "Save Playlist Files To:" box is filled in.
6. Press the "Playlist from iTunes".
7. You will be asked to find the song list that was exported from iTunes. Remember that it is a text file so if you don't see it in the folder check the filetype to make sure "All Types" is selected.
8. The playlist will be created and placed in the folder you specified on the info page. If there is already a playlist by the same name you will be asked if you want to overwrite it.

Categories: music, TiVo

Organizing Music for TiVo

The TiVo Digital Music Player is well designed in it's simplicity. All you do is tell the TiVo Desktop the root folder containing your music and it will allow you to access the files excacly as you would see them on your computer. Unlike iTunes or Windows Media Player TiVo offers no help in organizing your music so a little file maintenance may be in order. This is how I set my music up to reduce the clicking to get to what I want to hear.

Most of my music is considered rock so I placed all the non-rock music in separate folders and prefixed the folder with 1 (e.g. 1 Classical, 1 Country, 1 Jazz). This keeps these folders together and at the top of the folder list. I also created a called "0 Playlists" to house the playlists. The 0 keeps this folder at the very top of the folder list. If you have a lot of music then playlists are the best way to listen to a variety of music. I am going to take about how I make playlists later.

Categories: music, TiVo

Troubles with Galleon

As I mentioned before I have been trying different ways to stream music to my entertainment system from my computer. After messing around with Galleon I started having trouble with it not properly reading tag information so the wrong song would be listed on the screen during playback.

At the same time TiVo rolled out a newer version of their software that added several features. They include Yahoo!Photos, Yahoo!Weather, Yahoo!Traffic, Fandango movie showtimes, Live365 streaming, podcasting subcriptions.

So I scrapped the Galleon and am using the TiVo interface exclusively.

Categories: music, TiVo

Pandora

I stumbled across Pandora the other day after reading an article in Fast Company. Pandora is an internet radio station with a twist. The founders claim they have discovered music's DNA and a working feverishly to classify music using their criteria. The result is that you can select an artist or song and Pandora will create a custom radio station playing music with a similar DNA. As songs play you can rate them to further refine the playlist.

After you create the station you can add other artists or songs to broaden the types of music played. You can also rate the songs as they are playing to narrow or widen the station's music.

You are able to have up to 100 stations at one time. There is a free option that means you will have some advertising, but it has not been implemented yet so there is no telling how intrusive it will be. The pay service is only $36 a year.

Categories: music, radio

Listening to Music from Your Computer

I have been messing around with different ways to allow me to listen to my music collection stored on my computer through my stereo.

Prismiq Media Player
The first attempt was with a product called Prismiq media player, but it had several shortcomings.

• It only plays playlists, so you can't browse your collection without making a whole mess of playlists. (one per artist?, one per album?, one per genre?) The only way to make these playlists with Prismiq was to drag and drop. To get around this I created an Excel workbook that reads all the filenames and create playlists based on criteria, but they are not dynamic. To refresh the playlists the list of files had to be pulled into Excel then the playlists had to be recreated.
• The automatic playlists were grouped by the folder containing the song files. In my case this was the album name. There is nothing more useless than trying to find a song by browsing through a list of album names.
• The program on the desktop tended to gobble up processing resources even when the music wasn't playing.
• The connection between the device and the computer was tenuous at best. If no one was logged on to the computer, it wouldn't work. If someone else logged on while music was playing it either hicupped or stopped working. The only way I could find to fix this was to reboot the computer.

TiVo Desktop
TiVo now offers the ability to play content from your computer on your TV through the TiVo box. All I needed to do was get a USB network adaptor and download the program from TiVo. After working through some issues with the Windows Registry I was up and running. The TiVo desktop simply points to a folder that you specify and you browse the music using the computer's file system.

Galleon
I came across Galleon while I was trying to get the TiVo Desktop program to work properly. Galleon is a freeware Java program that performs the same functions as the TiVo Desktop, but has some important added features. There are several "apps" available that can do everything from stream music and photos to check weather reports and movie listings.

There are several ways to listen to your music using Galleon.

• The Music app allows you to view and play your music using the system folders (just like TiVo)
• The Music Organizer app allows you to view and play your music using data from the ID3 tags. For example, if you choose to view your music by genre then artist Galleon will create folders for each Genre and inside these folders will be a folder for each Artist. This does not effect the actual files but creates an interface that is eaisier to navigate.
• The iTunes app allows you to view and play your iTunes playlists. This is particularly exciting if you have smart playlists defined in iTunes.

The music can be played using WinAmp skins or a classic Tivo interface. Album art is displayed if it can be found and random internet images related (sometimes) to the artist are displayed based on a refresh rate you specify.

Categories: music