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ROTunes User Manual

Playlists

Playlists are stored within !ROTunes.playlists (or Boot:Choices.ROTunes if you've moved the location of the choices data)

Drag a directory of MP3 files to the !ROTunes iconbar to create a new playlist. Once you've created a playlist you can drag individual MP3 files into the main window in order to add them to the current playlist.
A current limitation is that you can't import individual files into the main library playlist.

Changing playlist
To change playlist, simply double-click on the relevant playlist in the 'library' sidebar. Note, that this will turn off 'Shuffle' mode if you have it enabled. This is because shuffling isn't really relevant to playlists which are usually only selected albums.

If you listen to every track in a specific playlist, ROTunes will automatically jump back to the beginning as it finishes playing the last track.

Deleting/Renaming playlists
You can delete any playlist as long as it's not the currently active one, by clicking MENU over the relevant one in the playlist window.
To rename a playlist, simply enter a new name from the sub-menu.

You cannot delete or rename the currently active playlist.

 

Smart Playlists

ROTunes supports 'smart' playlists, whereby you can select certain criteria that ROTunes will match when playing tracks. You can create a new smart playlist by clicking on the Add Playlist icon on the bottom toolbar. Smart Playlist windowThis will present a window similar to the one shown on the right.

If you've already selected a smart playlist, then the current choices will be displayed in the smart playlist window when you open it.

You can choose up to five criteria, either to choose from or to skip over. For instance, the example screenshot shows a smart playlist which will play all tracks except holiday ones (so you can play random tracks except Christmas carols for instance!)
To choose new criteria, click MENU over one of the boxes and select a genre from the menu. This menu consists of only the genres in your music collection, as opposed to the entire list of available genres.

If the 'allow' list is exactly the same as the 'deny' list, then the latter will automatically be set to <none> when you select it in future. This is to avoid ROTunes getting confused if you tell it to only play the same tracks you've told it to ignore!

Click on <all> or <none> to reset the relevant list.
The playlist name is the filename your playlist will be saved as when you click Save. Again confirmation will be asked for if you choose a duplicate name or try overwriting the current playlist.

During playback, if no tracks can be found which match your criteria, playback will connence at track one in the main playlist.

N.B. If you do edit the current playlist, the changes won't become active until you next reload the playlist.

Limitations At present, smart playlists are actually not that smart - just consisting of letting you choose the genres you want to listen to. In future I may expand this so you can select particular artists too, so you could just listen to albums by Pink Floyd for instance.

 

Technical information

The playlist data is stored inside the 'playlists' directory, which is either inside !ROTunes or Boot:Choices (depending on where you're storing your choices). Inside this directory are two additional directories; 'data' and 'shuffled', plus each of your playlists stored as a plain text file.
The 'data' directory contains tunedata (genre, track length etc) files for each of your playlists, using the same filenames.
The 'shuffled' directory contains the shuffle data for the playlist (not entirely supported yet!).

If manually deleting playlists, you should delete all three files; the actual playlist file itself, as well as the corresponding file inside 'data' and 'shuffled'.
Anything inside these two directories is managed automatically by ROTunes so you should never really need to access these directories.

© Paul Vigay