How to Create a Playlist in Mediascape application for Sony Ericsson Xperia X10

I recently just upgraded my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 phone from Android 1.6 to Android 2.1 expecting that the Mediascape application would allow me to create a playlist from the phone itself. Unfortunately I was wrong. The only way to create a playlist in Mediascape is to install a Media Go that can be downloaded from Sony PC Companion. Since I don't need another media player and I'm mostly running on Linux, installing Media Go isn't an option for me. After couple of hours googling about this issue, I found that Mediascape is able to recognize the M3U playlist file. I then went to Wikipedia to see what M3U format really is. It turns out that M3U file basically just a plain text file with some information in it and it's pretty easy to create/parse.

In order to create M3U format, there are 4 things that we need.
- Track length in seconds
- Artist name from ID3 tag
- Title name from ID3 tag
- Absolute/relative path where the audio file is located

This feature to create/read/modify the M3U format has been incorporated into my ID3Tidy application. To create a playlist in my Mediascape, all we need to do is to open the MP3 files that we wish to be included inside the playlist from /sdcard/music into the ID3Tidy application. And then create a M3U file and save it into the /sdcard/music/Whatever.m3u

Enjoy! :)

How to Implement Groovy's File.eachLine in Java

One thing that I like from Groovy is that the closures concept. The method File.eachLine() in Groovy is indeed very useful and handy when reading a file line by line. Because of Java's lack of closures, there is a tendency to repeat the steps of reading each line of a file in every code. It is actually quite easy to implement Groovy's File.eachLine in Java.

FileFunction.java

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public interface FileFunction {       public void read(String line); }

M3UParserFileFunction.java

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public class M3UParserFileFunction implements FileFunction {       private List<File> mp3Files;     private File m3uFile;           public M3UParserFileFunction(File m3uFile, List<File> mp3Files) {         this.mp3Files = mp3Files;         this.m3uFile = m3uFile;     }           @Override     public void read(String line) {         if (!line.trim().startsWith("#")) {             if (line.trim().toLowerCase().endsWith(".mp3")) {                 // Try relative path first, then absolute path.                 File file = new File(m3uFile.getParentFile(), line.trim());                 if (file.exists()) {                     mp3Files.add(file);                 } else if (!file.exists()) { // Use absolute path                     file = new File(line.trim());                     if (file.exists()) {                         mp3Files.add(file);                     }                 }             }         }     } }

FileUtils.java

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public class FileUtils {       private FileUtils() {     }       public static void eachLine(File file, FileFunction fileFunction) throws IOException {         BufferedReader br = null;         try {             br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));             String line = "";             while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {                 fileFunction.read(line);             }         } finally {             if (br != null) {                 br.close();             }         }     } }

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List<File> files = new ArrayList<File>(); FileUtils.eachLine(m3uFile, new M3UParserFileFunction(m3uFile, files)); for (File file : files) { doWhatever(file); }

ID3Tidy

I've created a new open source project for tidying up the ID3 tags information normally found in MP3 files.

ID3Tidy

Enjoy! :)