Being a professional geek as well as a DJ has its benefits.
After my show each week, I like to do two things:
- Upload my show to Mixcloud (and others).
- Put posting up so people can find the replay including a tracklist.
When you upload a mix to Mixcloud, you can provide the playlist to go with it so people know what tracks are on there. Whilst you can add each track by hand, Mixcloud lets you copy and paste a tracklist with each track a line of text in the form:
artist - track name
The nice thing about the above is it’s actually also a good, readable format you can also use for posting the tracklist either in a graphic (like I do) or simply as an accompanying post on Facebook.
Great, both problems solved!
But, however, Rekordbox doesn’t spit out the Playlist in that nice format so you have to find a way to translate from Rekordbox into the Mixcloud format. Now you can copy/paste between the Rekordbox fields and a text editor, then copy and paste the lot into the right format.
But that’s a bit of a faff. And I’m a geek and we like to automate stuff.
Rekordbox allows you to export Playlists in a couple of different file formats, KUVO and m3u8. So, to make life easier, I’ve worked out a command that will take an m3u8 (I looked at the other one but for a variety of reasons m3u8 was easier) and spit it out as text in the nice Mixcloud format.
In the spirit of sharing is caring, I’ve included it here for you to use too.
It’s written for the Mac, so I’ll apologise now I don’t have a Windows version. The code is not my finest hour – it’s a quick hack that does the job – but it works. Please do refine it and find a better way if you can.
From a Terminal window, simply type the following:
cat myfile.m3u8 | grep "#EXTINF:" | sed 's/^#EXTINF:[0-9]*,//g'
Where myfile.m3u8 is the name of the file you exported from Rekordbox. It should give you a number of lines that look a bit like this:
The Shapeshifters, Kimberly Davis - Life Is A Dancefloor (Club Mix)
Then you can simply select, copy and paste into Mixcloud on the upload page or into wherever else you need it.
Martin Gale 