Tracks and albums

If I go away abroad, I like to take whole albums with me rather than separate tracks. You can do this in IMS.

Click on the albums tab.

Choose what you want: only albums, or albums and tracks mixed (and select how many tracks there should be between albums).

You can even choose if you want the albums shuffled or not, and choose whether you want short albums or longer ones. And if you only want your favourites, it's possible too (independently of the track ratings you chose, eg you could have a playlist of unrated tracks + favourite albums.

Picture one shows the album settings, the other two show playlist examples of albums and mixed tracks and albums.

My favourite use for IMS.

I digitised my music a while back, and now have over 10,000 tracks on my computer. Like lots of people, I own a portable mp3 player. I cannot carry all my music with me, so regularly I use IMS to export random tracks on my MP3 player.

This will only work if your mp3 player appears as a drive on your computer when connected.

IMS even knows how much space is available on your player, so it copies just the right amount: when selecting how much to schedule in the Time tab, select Megabytes and click Select Drive (the button is only allowed when Megabytes is selected).

A window will open. Select any directory on your connected MP3 player. You will see the mount next to "Schedule" change automatically.

Now, hit Ctrl+S to schedule just the right amount, and Ctrl+D to copy to your player.

Hint: remove all music from your player before you select Select Drive to make space available.

The example on the picture created a 2 GB playlist for my iRiver X20.

My first playlist

Now that we have seen how to import music, let's have a look at a basic example. You want to create a 2 hour playlist, made of short songs. You don't want the same artists repeated too often, and decide that 7 hours between artists is enough.

- Change Time between artists so it says 7h00
- Change Schedule to 120, and select Minutes
- Tick Length at the bottom of the screen, and change the length to minimum 2 minutes and maximum 3 minutes.

In the menu, select Playlist | Schedule. Et voila...

Now that you have a playlist, what do you do with it > IMS is not a player, so you cannot listen to any of this yet.

You need to export your playlist. You have two main choices: create an m3u file that players like winamp or amarok understand, or copy the files on an external player.

In the menu,
select Playlist | Export to export to an m3u file.
select Playlist | Copy files to directory to copy to an external player.

If you select Playlist | Export, check the Playlists tab in the main window: there are lots of options on how the playlist is saved (you are not restricted to m3u for instance).

The library

We saw how to look for music in a previous post. IMS now knows where your music is. You must use the library screen to see the list of tracks, and modify it if necessary. Hit Ctrl-B or select Library | Browse. Here is what you can do in the library:

• Give ratings to tracks (double click the ratings column on a track, or right click and select Ratings)
• Listen to a track: double click on a title.
• Add a whole album in the playlist: double click on the Album title.
• Change the genres: double click on the genre column
• Search for songs: type some text at the bottom of the screen and press enter.
• Right click on any songs will popup a menu with more options.

A song's rating is important in IMS: 5 star songs are given priority over no star songs. You can also decide not to schedule certain ratings. You can give a rating to a song, an album or an artist. The better you define your ratings, the better IMS schedules your tracks !

You may also notice some tracks in blue in the library. This is because IMS tries to detect duplicate songs. Say you have an album by an artist and a compilation with the same tracks. IMS will try to match the two, and blacklist the multiple songs. It chooses the one with the highest quality; this sometimes gets confused with live albums, but you can always change the blacklist later anyway: this is done in the ratings screen.

You are now ready to make your first playlist...

Let's start at the beginning.

IMS is a music scheduler. In this first how-to, we will see how to make it find your music.

IMS can load up mp3, ogg, mpc and flac files. All you have to do is tell it where your music is. In order to do this, hit Ctrl L or select the option Library | Look for music in the menu. After this, a window will appear asking where to look for.


Once this is done, you will see a progress report.

When all the files have been scanned, the library status message at the bottom of the screen will change to show how many songs you have.

This is the first step to make IMS schedule your music. Press Ctrl S to see what happens next ....

Welcome to Intelligent Music Scheduler

The purpose of this programme is to simply and effectively schedule music and jingles for replay in programmes like Zararadio, Winamp, Windows Media Player and more.

I will try to post regular Howto's and tips in this blog. You can always ask questions on the Zararadio forums

Music can be scheduled in 1 hour blocks, 24 hour blocks or whatever length of playlist you choose.

When starting IMS up for the first time, these steps must be taken in the various tabs labelled; TIME, ALBUMS, GENRES/CLOCKS, PLAYLISTS, OTHER, AUDIOSCOBBLER, ZARARADIO.