Windows Media Player Sorting issue

[hoffm11]

Is Microsoft going to fix the sorting issue in Windows Media player? Songs in a playlist show up in reverse order. Is there a way around this (registry hack, etc.)?

[Janak Parekh]

WMP's playlist weaknesses was one of many topics brought up at the Summit. I can say that the current version (WMP9) will keep the current behavior, but I can't speculate about the future. Darn, I hate NDAs. :(

For WMP9, I suggest a third-party tool to generate a sorted playlist. CEPlaylist (http://www.ceng.com/CEPlaylist/description.asp) is probably the most popular.

--janak

[hoffm11]

Janak,

I installed CE Playlist and I really like it. I will most likely buy it. My issue is that I bought PocketMusic and liked it in the beginning and then it started to do wierd things, so I tried out PocketPlayer and that worked and started to act up. :devilboy: I decided to install PHM Pocket PC Plus(http://www.phm.lu/Products/PocketPC/Plus/) and used Windows Media and it works great. Now with CEPlaylist, I will be very happy. :D

[jmjstandin]

The playlist ordering problem is particularly annoying for tracks ripped from a CD whose name starts with the track number and which end up in reverse order on the Pocket PC. Here is a solution which will work if you happen to have Mathematica. It is based on noticing that playlists are simple XML files and uses Mathematica's built in functions for handling that. It sorts on the track filenames but other sorting methods could be implemented similarly. The same could surely be done with other tools.

You have to create the playlist on the PDA, copy it to your PC, apply the following function to create a new version and then copy it back to the PDA.

SortPlaylist::usage = "SortPlaylist[asxfile1,asxfile2] sorts the Windows \
Media playlist in file asxfile1 and saves it as asxfile2."

SortPlaylist[pl1_String, pl2_String] := Module[{},
Export[pl2, Import[pl1,
"XML"] /. {a__, entries :
XMLElement["ENTRY", {}, {XMLElement["ref", {_}, {}]}] ..} :> {
a, Sequence @@ Sort[{entries}]},
"XML", ConversionOptions -> {"AttributeQuoting" -> "\""}]
]


Hope this helps somebody. It was fun as a programming exercise.

[jmjstandin]

I realised that my code in the above post is not completely general. It will only work if you created the playlists on the Pocket PC with default options (Folder: None, Location: Main Memory) so the playlists must be located in the main My Documents folder. Sorry, I may try to do better when I get some time.