LongPlayer

LongPlayer Manual

Managing Playlists

Before you can start queueing random music, you only have to define the location of the files to queue in the Manage Playlists dialog window.

the playlists window

A Playlist is defined by a number of m3u playlists and/or directories where LongPlayer searches (recursively or not) for files specified by the include and exclude masks, e.g. mp3 files.

Once you have defined a Playlist, you're ready to go.

The main window

The LongPlayer main window is divided into 3 parts.

the main window

In the upper part, the Queue Parameters section, you can select what music LongPlayer should queue. For instant music: just select a playlist and click on the first button in the toolbar (Queue and Play). After a few seconds, your media player should start its job.
When a file is being played, an entry is added to the middle part of the window.Also, more information is showed in the lower part, the Song Details section. There you can also adjust the rating of the song and set the genre. To view and change the details of other songs, just select the entry in the list. Also, right-click on a song entry for more options.

Queue parameters explained

What should I do with this genre thing?

You should see it as a 2D matrix where you can position each song. Where you put it is entirely up to you, but you should position related genres close to each other. Work out a scheme and send it to me or follow your heart and categorize songs intuitively. You can make LongPlayer queue a subset of the chart by drawing a rectangle into the widget. Click once to remove the rectangle again. Also, LongPlayer tries to minimize differences in genre if the "Smooth Transitions" box is checked.

How LongPlayer queues songs

First, it makes a list of all songs in your playlist. Depending on the queue effort set in the Preferences, this is done each time, hourly or daily. Then, it picks a bunch of random songs and looks at their genre, the "played date" and rating. Depending on the importance of rating set in the Preferences, a high rating can compensate somewhat for a song that has just been listened to. The higher the queue effort, the more songs are examined before a song is selected to be queued.

How LongPlayer recognises songs

When storing song information in the database, LongPlayer generates a unique ID for each song based on the content. This way you can move or rename a song as you like. LongPlayer will still remember when you last played that song.

Other functions

LongPlayer comes with a few command-line options: try running it with --help.

LongPlayer is also remotely accessible in a very simple manner: it reads input commands that are present in a file called remote.txt in your LongPlayer dir. LongPlayer supports the following commands (arguments separated with newlines):

For example: on a unix system, if you want to rate a song to 6/10, just type: echo -e "rate\n1" > ~/.lplayer/remote.txt

mIRC users: you can find an example longplayer.ini file in the lplayer installation dir to see how you can get lPlayer information to output in mIRC.

Finally, information of the current song is always available in the file ~/.lplayer/.lplayerout.txt (or current.txt): title, filename, data (seconds since 1970/1/1), times, rating and length.