Can I rename and fix m3u playlists?

MusicBrainz Picard
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Hi - Picard newbie here, so apologies if this has an obvious answer - I’ve searched through the docs and forums, but without much luck.

I am slowly using Picard to re-tag my music collection, but not fixing file names or folders yet, as I’m worried about my playlists. I have a number of playlists I’ve built up over the years, mostly just m3u files (some were iTunes smart playlists, but I converted them to m3u files as well so I could use them on non-Apple devices)

Is there some way to use Picard scripts to rename everything to a cleaner folder/file scheme, and also modify my m3u playlists with the new names?

Or do the scripts output the name changes to a text file / log in some way, so I could fix the playlists myself later?

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Don’t know about the renaming… but have you noticed in Picard \ OPTIONS \ Plugins there is Generate M3U playlist

That will create fresh ones for you from any cluster you have. May save a bit of time with album playlists.

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Yeah - that’s one of the many drivers I have for moving :slight_smile:

But I have things like playlists of my top 100 albums, playlists of music from my wedding, and the like, which don’t correspond to any simple combinations of tags/folders.

I’m hoping I can at least grab the output of any renaming operation for manual fixing.

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beets has a plugin for automatically (re)generating playlists as data in its library is updated. You could couple this with beets’ flexible attributes and add attributes such as “wedding” or “top100” and use those with the Smart Playlist plugin.

You could maybe do something similar with saving custom tags in Picard, using the $set() command (see documentation for functions), but I don’t think there’s anything in Picard that will currently allow to autogenerate playlists based on non-release data—and since Picard doesn’t have a library, it can also only generate playlists based on files that it currently has loaded (since it is completely unaware of any files that is not loaded into Picard at any given time).

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Beets looks quite neat - I hadn’t seen that before. And I hadn’t quite taken on board that Picard only looks at music it has loaded - I probably should try out beets, it’d be a hassle loading all my music into Picard at the same time.