Monday, January 3, 2011

Winamp Automatically Plays Similar Songs for You

Winamp-logoImage via Wikipedia
One of the problems with having a huge music library is deciding on what songs to listen to.  Yes I know, that sounds strange but just hear me out.  Let's say you play one song that puts you in a certain mood and you wanna keep the groove goin', but it can be pain sorting through hundreds or thousands just to find one that matches the set mood.  And we all know there are times where you don't wanna ruin that mood ;-)

Winamp easily solves this problem.  Just right click on the song you're playing and choose "play tracks similar to..." Based upon your settings, Winamp will generate a playlist of related songs.  That's it!  Simple right? There are several options to choose from such as if you want to include the same artist and album you began the playlist with, as well as how long you'd like the play list to be.


Solving the Winamp Playlist Generator Problem

Every now and then, usually when I upgrade to a new version of Winamp, it's unable to generate the playlist.  Here's a fix for it:  
  1. Make sure Winamp is closed
  2. Enable the viewing of hidden folders on your computer
  3. Navigate to: %AppData%\Winamp\Plugins\Gracenote or %ProgramFiles%\Winamp\Plugins\Gracenote
    • You should be able to get to these directories from from My Computer\Users\
  4. Delete the file named: cddbplm.pdb
  5. Delete the file named: cddbplm.idx
  6. Open Winamp, right-click, go to options and select preferences
  7. On the left side, under Plug-ins, select media library and then click on Playlist Generator in the right side of the window
  8. Click on scan (or reset database and then click scan)
Thank you to Juanus in the Winamp Forums for the fix.
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