Skip to main content

M3U.NET: Parsing and Output of .m3u files in .NET

I've been reorganizing my media library using the very cool MusicBrainz Picard, but of course all my m3u files broke. So I wrote the free M3U.NET library, and then wrote a utility called FixM3U that regenerates an M3U file by searching your music folder for the media files based on whatever extended M3U information is available:

> FixM3u.exe /order:title,artist foo.m3u bar.m3u ...

The M3U.NET library itself has a fairly simple interface:

// Parsing M3U files.
public static class M3u
{
  // Write a media list to an extended M3U file.
  public static string Write(IEnumerable<MediaFile> media);
  // Parse an M3U file.
  public static IEnumerable<MediaFile> Parse(
         string input,
         DirectiveOrder order);
  // Parse an M3U file.
  public static IEnumerable<MediaFile> Parse(
         IEnumerable<string> lines,
         DirectiveOrder order);
}

The 3 exported types are straightforward. A MediaFile just has a full path to the file itself and a list of directives supported by the extended M3U format:

// A media file description.
public sealed class MediaFile
{
    // The full absolute path to the file.
    public string Path { get; set; }
    // Extended M3U directives.
    public List<MediaDirective> Directives { get; set; }
}

The directives are represented in this library as key-value pairs:

// An extended M3U directive.
public struct MediaDirective
{
    // The directive name.
    public string Name { get; set; }
    // The directive value.
    public string Value { get; set; }
    // The separator delineating this field from the next.
    public char? Separator { get; set; }
}

The currently supported keys are "Artist", "Title" and "Length".

The M3U format is supposed to order directives as "length, artist - title", but iTunes seems to reverse the order of artist and title. I've thus made this configurable via a parsing parameter of type DirectiveOrder, and you can specify the ordering when parsing:

// The order of the title and artist directives.
public enum DirectiveOrder
{
    // Artist followed by title.
    ArtistTitle,
    // Title followed by artist.
    TitleArtist,
}

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blue-eyed Islander Puzzle - an analysis

Many people find themselves stumped by the so-called Blue-Eyed Islanders puzzle . There is also much controversy over its supposed solution. I'm going to analyze the problem and the solution, and in the process, explain why the solution works. To begin, let's modify the problem slightly and say that there's only 1 blue-eyed islander. When the foreigner makes his pronouncement, the blue-eyed islander looks around and sees no other blue eyes, and being logical, correctly deduces that his own eyes must be blue in order for the foreigner's statement to make sense. The lone blue-eyed islander thus commits suicide the following day at noon. Now comes the tricky part, and the source of much confusion. Let's say there are 2 blue-eyed islanders, Mort and Bob. When the foreigner makes his pronouncement, Mort and Bob look around and see only each other. Mort and Bob thus both temporarily assume that the other will commit suicide the following day at noon. Imagine their chagrin...

The Chicken and the Egg - Redux

There is still considerable skepticism regarding my conclusion that the chicken comes first . Many of the objections are simply due to different interpretations of the question, interpretations which I consider unfaithful to the original purpose of the chicken-egg dilemma . Fundamentally, this question is supposed to represent a causality dilemma. When there is a causal dependency between any two objects, A and B, we can ask ourselves, "which came first, A or B?" An object C could have caused B, and thus triggered the recursive relation C→B→A→B→A... Of course, it could just as easily have been A that was caused first. To properly answer this question, we must reduce the abstract objects A and B to concrete objects and apply our scientific knowledge to ground the recursion. Using chickens and eggs as our objects, we have to precisely define what chickens and what eggs to consider. The question "which came first, chickens or any type of egg?" is not a causal dilemma a...

Easy Reverse Mode Automatic Differentiation in C#

Continuing from my last post on implementing forward-mode automatic differentiation (AD) using C# operator overloading , this is just a quick follow-up showing how easy reverse mode is to achieve, and why it's important. Why Reverse Mode Automatic Differentiation? As explained in the last post, the vector representation of forward-mode AD can compute the derivatives of all parameter simultaneously, but it does so with considerable space cost: each operation creates a vector computing the derivative of each parameter. So N parameters with M operations would allocation O(N*M) space. It turns out, this is unnecessary! Reverse mode AD allocates only O(N+M) space to compute the derivatives of N parameters across M operations. In general, forward mode AD is best suited to differentiating functions of type: R → R N That is, functions of 1 parameter that compute multiple outputs. Reverse mode AD is suited to the dual scenario: R N → R That is, functions of many parameters t...