Creating a Playlist for your LightShowPi (easy mode)

The default documentation says to create a .playlist file, and edit the file to contain one song per line in the following format:

Song Name 1 [Tab] /Path/to/your/music/file

Well, since it's Christmas I'd like to have a playlist with 50+ songs which can be very time consuming to create. What I found digging through the LSP files was that under the /tools/ folder there's a .py script to automate the process, and it works great.

I'm assuming the following:
  • You have a functioning RPi
  • Your RPi is on your home network and you know its IP address
  • You have a functioning LightShow Pi installation 
  • You can transfer files to your RPi
To automate the .playlist creation process:
  1. Copy all your music to a folder on your Pi. 
    • I have a folder for every CD I copy over under /home/pi/lightshowpi/music/christmas/   
  2. OPTIONAL: Remove spaces from filenames
    •  Open up a terminal
    • Browse to your folder containing the music
      • $ cd /home/pi/lightshowpi/music/christmas/xmas
    • Run this command to replace spaces with uderscores
      • $ find -name "* *" -type f | rename 's/ /_/g'
  3. Browse to the /tools/ folder
    • $ cd /home/pi/lightshowpi/tools/
  4. Run the playlist_generator.py script
    • $ python playlist_generator.py
    • At the prompt enter the folder path of your music
  5. Done! The playlist file will be created in the same folder as the music files.
Now you just gotta update your .cfg file to point to this new playlist.

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