Using Amarok Generated Playlists (m3u) on Sansa Clip

Guy — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:23:39 +0000

Few days ago, for the first time, I’ve created a playlist using Amarok for files on my Sansa Clip player. To my surprise (and disappointment) when I’ve unplugged my Sansa Clip and powered it, the playlist showed up empty, unlike playlists which originated in Windows. As I keep my music collection organized in Amarok, the situation seemed to be very uncomfortable.

I’ve decided to compare one of the working playlist files and the “empty” Amarok generated playlist. Two things were noticeable:

Amarok uses forward slashes, like in a Linux environment, and the working playlist used backward slashes.
The working playlist used relative paths without any prefix – directly beginning with the path. Amarok prefixed the relative paths with a dot-slash (./).

After noticing those things I’ve modified my Amarok generated playlist to look like the Windows generated one, and voila, it worked. I tried going through Amarok’s configuration dialogs to find some option controlling the format of generated m3u playlists, but couldn’t find any (I’m using Amarok 1.4.10). So with my newly found wits I’ve looked for a way to make using the playlists easier. I’ve came up with the following one-liner:

find -name "*.m3u" | xargs -I{} sed "s/^\.\///;s/\//\\\\/g" -i'' {}

The command should be run in the MUSIC directory of the Sansa Clip’s filesystem. It recursivey looks for m3u playlists and for each one strips any leading dot-slash and replaces forward slashes with backward ones. It can be used to easily convert all your playlists to the format understandable by Sansa Clip.

Amarok Sleep – Stop Playback After Specified Amount of Time

Guy — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:13:39 +0000

Amarok is my favourite music player. I like to listen to music when I go a sleep, but I don’t want the music to keep playing all night long. This is why I’ve added a sleep feature to radio.py. Unfortunately Amarok doesn’t have a built-in sleep functionality, but the Amarok developers left open door for us to implement it with ease by means of interfaces allowing to control amarok from the command line.

The first solution uses Amarok itself. The Amarok developers have provided means of controlling Amarok via the command-line. So we’ll combine this with the sleep command sleep command, and run the following in a console:



sleep 120m; amarok --stop

This will cause Amarok to stop after 120 minutes. The sleep command takes a number and a suffix which can be one of s, m, h and d (for seconds, minutes, hours and days). You can use it to easily set the duration before the playback halts.
Another solution, a more general one, would be to use DCOP. Amarok provides a very extensive DCOP interface that allows to control most of its features, including of course stopping the playback. So we could also use

sleep 1h; dcop amarok player stop

To stop Amarok in one hour.
A little note about the last solution. This post is written for Amarok 1.4 and not 2.0 as I didn't switch yet to KDE 4. DCOP was replaced in KDE 4 by D-Bus and the last solution would probably not work. However you could probably easily adjust it to the new D-Bus interface.

Guy Rutenberg » Amarok

Using Amarok Generated Playlists (m3u) on Sansa Clip

Amarok Sleep – Stop Playback After Specified Amount of Time