Zune Playlists by Folder
I would imagine that everyone who’s ever tried to organize an MP3 collection has struggled in some way or another. Some people just throw everything willy-nilly into one big folder and let their software of choice sort it out. That’s not for me, though. Why? Well, when you do that you’re putting all of your eggs into one basket. Since it’s the application that’s holding all the information about your collection, changing your music application can cause all of your organization to fly out the window. I much prefer to organize by using folders and carefully editing the files’ tags. Doing so allows me to change from iTunes to Zune or to Winamp, access my collection over my home network, or even open my library on a computer running an entirely different OS, all while maintaining the organization of files and their tags. Granted, initial setup and subsequent maintenance of your collection can take more time, but I think it’s worth the effort. (My tagging application of choice, by the way, is MP3tag, freeware.)
I have my collection organized into folders. Top-level folders are genres, and subfolders hold albums by title and artist. For example, some of my top-level folders are for Big Band, Classical Choral and Instrumental, Classical Vocal, Jazz and Acoustic, etc. etc. The one exception I made was to create a top-level folder for all of my Christmas music with subfolders based on album. Since I listen to that music only at a specific time each year, that seemed to make the most sense.
Camille and I both have 30GB Zunes. As great as my iPhone is, its 8GB can’t compete, and it’s nice to have a device dedicated to music only with lots of storage (though my collection won’t come close to fitting on it… boo-hoo). The Zune software is actually pretty nice once you get used to its quirks, but one thing it just won’t do is to create playlists based on folders. Not too long ago I was going through this insane hoop-jumping exercise to get around the limitation that involved creating Windows Media Player playlists, opening the playlist in a text editor to change the header information, saving the file with a new extension… bleah. It was an aggravating mess. (And an unnecessary one, too… why don’t the brain trusts over at Microsoft solve the problem in the Zune software itself???)
But now… Merry Christmas to me. I just found a very handy tool to get around the Zune software’s limitation. It’s called KritZu, developed by Vishal Joshi. Launch it, make a couple of initial settings, click the Generate button, and KritZu spits out a playlist of all the songs in a given folder and its subfolders. If you like, it’ll even make individual playlists for multiple subfolders.
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