Organize your #music by markers and #PHP #CLI script

Do you have any favorite songs, songs for relax, work, etc.? If yes, how do you organize your music? Do you prefer to use folders or playlists? If playlists, how do you sync it between devices and keep it up-to-date? I tried many ways before I started to use markers. So let me introduce markers to you.

Introduction

“Marker” is a letter at the end of file name. If you have a file song.mp3, you can mark it as favorite by adding “F” before extension. In this case it will be song.F.mp3. You can mark it also as relax by adding “R” and you get song.FR.mp3.

You probably will have many markers at the end. So you can enforce position of every marker (for example FR) and use another character (for example _) as space. The result may look like:

$ tree
.
├── Artist - Song A.FD.mp3
├── Artist - Song B.F_.mp3
└── Artist - Song C._D.mp3

0 directories, 3 files

It will help you with quick detection if it is new (song.mp3) or unwanted (song.__.mp3) song.

How to work with it?

If you have your files marked, you can use a playlist generator. The playlist generator supports m3u and pls formats and needs PHP to run. You will also need script which configures the playlist generator for you. Like this one:

An first argument is path to folder with songs and it registers following markers:

• f for favorite songs
• r for relax songs
• w for work songs
• d for dynamic songs

The only thing you need to do is run php run.php ./Songs. The playlist generator will creates playlists in current working directory.

Why am I using markers?

I need to organize my music over many devices (notebook, desktop, car, etc.) via file synchronization and playlists. It helps me to keep my music files clear - if a song lost last marker I can painlessly delete it.

If you like this idea then enjoy it and share it with your friends.