Jtdylktuy

Simple question here but I'm guessing there's not such a simple answer.

I'm moving m3u playlists from my PC to my smart phone therefore I mass change the directories to suit (see below) as the files structures on both devices are identical.

PC: A:DANIELMy MusicArtists A - JAAviciiAvicii - The Nights (Lyric Video).mp3

Phone: ..My MusicArtists A - JAAviciiAvicii - The Nights (Lyric Video).mp3

My new method means that all of the files will be in the main music directory on my smart phone rather than using the file structure of my PC. Therefore my playlists now need to look like this:

PC: A:DANIELMy MusicArtists A - JAAviciiAvicii - The Nights (Lyric Video).mp3

Phone: ..My MusicAvicii - The Nights (Lyric Video).mp3

Adding the "..My Music" directory at the start is obviously easy, but how do I remove the directories, leaving only the file names when there are obviously varying lengths of directories. This one has 3 folders below the "Music" folder however some could be 4, 5 etc.

I could do this manually however when I have many playlists with 300+ songs on each I'm not liking that idea. Can anyone think of a way of doing it on mass?

I've toyed around with pasting the text into Excel's and using it's "Text to Columns" feature but I can't think of way of using this where I wouldn't have to visit each line the same as raw text editing.

Thanks in advance,
Dan

On excel, write everything on one column, then on the second column, paste this formula to get what you need:

=CONCATENATE("..My Music",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"",REPT(" ",LEN(A1))),LEN(A1))))

I have searched and asked about this question with no good results, until I somehow reached this Superuser dot com link. Wonderful. If you're not proficient with Excel, even the above might appear daunting, or won't work for you right out of the box.

Here are my examples of before and after, and the slightly modified excel code I used.

My desktop media center software created an .m3u playlist. The contents of the playlist is a simple ansi text editable dataset. Note, that it includes all the desktop PC drives and sub-folders. Some of the software players I tested for my mobile devices could not handle that below file structure. That's the point of the above Excel code.

J:NTFS_1MP3_DDan Fogelberg - River of Souls - 08 - A Love Like
This.mp3

J:NTFS_1MP3_HHarry Chapin - Verities & Balderdash - 04 - 30,000
Pounds Of Bananas.mp3

J:NTFS_1MP3_HHarry Chapin - Story of a Life, disc 2 - 04 - 30,000
Pounds of Bananas (live).mp3

Here below, is the output of my slightly modified version of the above Excel code:

Dan Fogelberg - River of Souls - 08 - A Love Like This.mp3

Harry Chapin - Verities & Balderdash - 04 - 30,000 Pounds Of
Bananas.mp3

Harry Chapin - Story of a Life, disc 2 - 04 - 30,000 Pounds of
Bananas (live).mp3

In the case above, for my needs, even the default Music folder was removed. Now, with the file structure all 4 mobile software players I have tested work.

For my case, the Excel code looks like:

original code:

=CONCATENATE("..My Music",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"",REPT(" ",LEN(A1))),LEN(A1))))

my code version:

=CONCATENATE("",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A3,"",REPT(" ",LEN(A3))),LEN(A3))))

Of course, on the back end, you still need to copy the second Excel column and paste it into a plain text editor, to save your results. Then, you need to rename the text file from .txt to .m3u.

Hope it works out for you.