Monday, November 30, 2009

Create Mega Android Playlists from PC

Wanting to create a large playlist for my HTC Hero android based phone, I found out this is a fairly painful task since the obvious method involves adding songs one by one!

Fear not fellow androiders, here is how to create mega playlists easily (although it does involve typing a command OMG :) )

1- Plug in the phone over USB. My phone appears as drive G:
2- Open a terminal window, and "cd" into the Folder containing the music you would like to make a "playlist". In my case

g:
cd MP3/80sMusic

3- Here comes the magic

dir /B > 80s-best-Music.m3u
exit

4- Et voila, the terminal window exits, safely remove your USB disk, turn off the USB connection from the phone and that is it!

Addendum for Linux users
1- Mount your phone on some directory, and "cd" to it. In my case

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/androidy
cd /media/androidy

2- Create the playlist file

cd MP3/80sMusic
ls > 80s-best-Music.m3u

3- Eject and Et voila. It's really almost identical to the Windows case

cd / ; sudo umount /media/androidy


I was pleasently surprised to find that in Android ALL music apps share the same playlists. So that newly created playlist is seen by the built-in Music application, as well as with the 3rd party Music player MixZing. It is also pleasantly surprising that Android seems to scan the whole folder structure for the .M3U files wherever they may be and use them as playlists! Sweet

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Taking down your CPUs

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

Nov 19 11:59:35 localhost kernel: CPU 1 is now offline
Nov 19 11:59:35 localhost kernel: SMP alternatives: switching to UP code

Since my CPU is/was dual core, it's now single .. and thus the kernel has switched to UP code... neat !