I decided to put together a little program to extract data from the LMS database and put it out in some useful formats. Specifically, it can create HTML pages, Excel spreadsheets and comma-separated-value (CSV) files suitable for loading into other spreadsheet or database-type software.
This lets me pull out lists of albums (organized by artist or genre or whatever), or tracks, or my pre-defined playlists, or anything, and put them into easily readable Web pages or spreadsheets. It isn't rocket science or earth-shattering; it's just a nice little convenience. Basically, it can take any SQL query (there are several pre-packaged queries built in, but it can also take new ones as long as they're syntactically correct), run them against the LMS database, and spit out the results in any of those three file formats: HTML, Excel and CSV. So for example, you can select the "Albums by Genre" query, tell it where your LMS database is, tell it you want an HTML and an Excel file, click the "Run" button, and it will spit out those files with all your albums, ordered by genre. Simple. If you want additional fields that aren't included in the built-in "Albums by Genre" query, you can edit the SQL to suit your needs. (Clearly, to customize the SQL you'll have to know something about SQL and the database fields, or ask somebody who does.) There are 7 built-in queries: Albums by Artist Albums by Genre Albums by Year Playlists (lists all tracks in all playlists) Playlist Names (lists just the playlist names and total number of tracks in each) Tracks by Artist/Album Tracks by Genre Any of these can be used as a starting point and then modified or customized to suit you. Or you can just start from scratch and define a completely new query, for whatever information you want. Defined extracts (either built-in or customized) can be saved in a file, so you can re-use them. I generally re-run extracts after I've added new albums, or made significant changes to tags. You can define a collection of different extracts, and save them all into one file, then just open that file and select the ones you want to run. I'm making the program available to anyone who wants to use it. But here's the deal: 1) This is not a highly-polished, commercial-grade piece of software, and I have no intention of making a career of continuing development on it. It's just a little utility I threw together quickly, for my own use. It works well for what it is, but I don't plan to spend a lot of time supporting it. If someone has a question or problem, they're welcome to let me know and I will respond, but the response might sometimes be "I don't have time to deal with that right now." 2) It runs on Windows machines only, and there won't be any Linux or OS-X version. If your LMS runs on a non-Windows system you can still use the program, but only if you run it on a Windows machine and either map a drive to the LMS system or make a copy of the LMS database on the Windows system. I've tested it on Windows XP and 7. It should run on Windows 8, but I don't have a system to test it on. You can find the software and documentation at http://thecosyns.com/lms/lmsextractor.html I hope this is useful to some of you. Let me know if you have problems installing or using it (or even if you don't have problems). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dogberry2's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18883 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101600 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
