mAirList's playlists can easily be propagated with files dropped in from the built-in directory browsers or Windows Explorer. However, in a complex studio environment, it might be convenient to use some sort of file and playlist management. mAirList currently offers interfaces to three such music databases: iTunes, eldoDB and radioDB.
To add a new database connection, click the “Add” button and select the desired database type. Then, enter the required details in the database parameters field below. Finally, do not forget to save the data with the “Save changes” button appearing below the parameter field.
Apple iTunes is a digital jukebox and music library software that comes along with the popular iPod MP3 players, but can also be used when you do not own an iPod. mAirList allows you to use the playlists defined in iTunes, search for songs, and access the whole database in a tree structure identical to the one found on your iPod.
iTunes maintains its own database of
MP3 files in the My Documents\My Music\iTunes
folder on your local hard drive. In particular, in that folder resides
the file iTunes Music Library.xml which contains information
about all files in the database, all defined playlists and so on.
When adding a new iTunes database connection, only one parameter has to be set:
This is the complete path and file name of the
iTunes Music Library.xml file.
eldoDB is the music database written for mAirList by Torben Weibert. It uses MySQL as its storage backend, and comes with the Musikliste.exe management software. You can manage your song archive, and manually or automatically create playlists.
Development of eldoDB has been abandoned in favor of the upcoming mAirListDB project (scheduled to be released along with mAirList 3.0). However, you can still use eldoDB in the meantime.
The required parameters are:
The database protocol to be used to connect to the
SQL server, usually mysql-3.23. You need the client library
libmysql323.dll. For reasons of licensing, this is the only
client library version to be used with closed-source software like
mAirList, but you can also connect to newer MySQL servers with it
(in fact, \eldoDB\ needs at least MySQL Server version 4.0).
These are the settings used to connect to the MySQL server.
eldoDB uses relative filenames within the database, which are prepended by a base directory specified for each client. This way, you can easily use different directories when accessing your music folder, for example through a local hard disk on the server, through a network share on your clients, anlifdbwqay.d through a different local drive (holding a copy of the library, for redundancy) on your studio computer. Add a backslash at the end of the folder name.
radioDB, available from http://www.radiodb.de, is a music database developed for mAirList by Christoph Krämer based on PostgreSQL. The original, deprecated radioDB had a web-based frontend written in PHP. radioDB2 is a complete redesign and rewrite and includes a Java client. To connect to a radioDB2 database, set the following paramters:
The database protocol to be used to connect to the
SQL server, usually postgresql-7.3. You need the client library
libpq73.dll.
(mAirList does not support any client library newer than 7.3, but just
like with MySQL, an old client library will usually work with
newer server versions.)
These are the settings used to connect to the PostgreSQL server.
radioDB stores absolute filenames in the database. If your copy of mAirList runs on a different computer from which the files are accessed through a different path (for example, through a network share), you can enter this base path here. Add a trailing backslash. Also note the following option.
When you need to change the absolute file names stored in the radioDB database, mAirList can automatically strip the “wrong” base path from the absolute file names. If this is desired, enter the path to strip here. Afterwards, the new BaseDir will be prepended, resulting in the new absolute, correct file name.
If your radioDB installation runs on a Linux server, the file names will contain slashes (/) instead of backslashes (\) to delimit directory names. If so, enter “/” here, and mAirList will convert them back to backslashes.
An on-the-fly database is a very simple type of database. At program startup, it recursively scans a specific folder and provides these files through mAirList's database interface; you can browse the files by artist in the database browser, and you can use the database search browser to look for a certain song. The on-the-fly database reads the mAirList file tags and/or the ordinary file tags (ID3, MusiFile, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC) in order to determine the artist and title of a file. It will also detect mAirList file tags created with the Save to Tag function in the PFL or Properties dialogs.
On-the-fly databases can operate in a cached or a non-cached mode.
In the non-cached mode, the directory is freshly scanned each time you
run mAirList. This might take a long time depending on the number
of files. In cached mode, a file named OnTheFlyCache.mlp
is created in the specified directory after scanning. The next
time you run mAirList, it reads this file instead of scanning the
directory again. However, if you delete or add files, these changes
will not be detected unless you also set the AutoRescan option;
then, new files will be added to the cache file, and deleted files will
be removed from it.
You can also use the Save to Database feature for saving cue points or other item meta data to the on the fly database. This information is stored in the cache file, so caching must be enabled. Note that the AutoRescan mechanism does not re-read existing files. If you save cue information to both the database cache file as well as to the file tag, the information from the cache file will have precedence.
As with any other database type, you can create multiple on-the-fly connections in case your library is distributed among several folders.
This is the directory to scan. Omit the trailing backslash.