Prior to my joining the BMP staff, streaming music was one of the least enjoyable tasks available to staff. Most playlists were very long, and had to be coded by hand, sometimes taking hours, or even days to complete. This resulted in a huge lack of updates in the streaming music system. Now however I have created a small script that will largely do all the work for you. The following is a tutorial on how to use this.

Things you will need:
- MP3Tag. (Can be downloaded here: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/)
- A local folder containing the music you wish to add to the playlists
- The id3 tag export script itself

Start off by downloading and installing MP3Tag.

Start up the program, then drag and drop the music you wish to add to the playlist into the main window.

Make sure everything is ordered correctly, then go to "File > Export".

In the window that just popped up, click "New", name it whatever you wish, and Notepad, (or whatever text editor is your default) should open.
In your text editor, erase the default text, and replace it with the following code:

$filename(playlist.js)'[{'
$loop(%_path%)	"title" : "%title%" ,
	"artist" : "%artist%" ,
	"mp3" : "%_filename_ext%" ,
	"poster" : "AlbumArtLarge.png"
'},{'
$loopend()'}]'

Save and use this template to export as "Playlist.js"

Open up the resulting js file in your favorite text editor, (for code such as this, I would recommend Notepad++) and remove the last "},{" at the bottom of the document just above the closing tag. This is the only manual step of this process, as due to it's looping nature, I can have the file self closing, but there will always be an extra tag that needs to be removed by hand.

Once this is done, simply upload the playlist as you normally would via ftp. (See documentation on site management for more information on creating and updating streaming music pages)

Note: Steps 4-6 are only necessary once. After you create the script, it will always be in your export options from then on.