My obsession with WMP playlists

For programming practice, I've been writing PHP scripts that will turn various lists of musicians into playlists for Windows Media Player.* Basically, you find a list of musicians that you'd like to listen to as a set, put that list in the appropriate script (see below), and out comes a playlist you can open with Windows Media Player to listen to your list of artists. For long lists of artists, this saves a lot of time over the usual method of putting them in one at a time.

The musician lists you can use for this purpose so far with my little tools are:

Last.fm Tagged Artists
*Playlist maker
*Example data source
*Example playlist (rock.wpl)
*Greasemonkey script (for users of Firefox with Greasemonkey installed)

Last.fm Calendar
*Playlist maker
*Example data source
*Example playlist (portland408to808.wpl)
*Greasemonkey script (for users of Firefox with Greasemonkey installed)

Last.fm User's Most-Listened Artists
*Playlist maker
*Example data source
*Example playlist (jamidwyer.wpl)
*Greasemonkey script (for users of Firefox with Greasemonkey installed)

iLike User Most-Played Artists
*Playlist maker
*Example data source
*Example playlist (jami.wpl)
*Greasemonkey script (for users of Firefox with Greasemonkey installed)

Eventful Calendar
*Playlist maker
*Example data source

Comma-Separated Values File
*Playlist maker
*Data source is a list of artists only saved as a CSV in Excel or OpenOffice Calc.
*Example playlist (sasquatch.wpl)

*I know Windows Media Player is not hip. But unbeknownst to even the tech-savviest, music-lovingest people I talk to, Windows Media Player's playlists will dynamically add and sort music by criteria you set. Instant mix tape! This was far more powerful than the playlists iTunes had back in 2004, when I took my first faltering steps to quit stealing the mp3 files I wanted, I discovered that iTunes had indeed sold me intentionally-crippled aac files that indeed wouldn't play on my phone's mp3 player, and I quit using iTunes in fury.

So no, I will not be writing anything, ever, for intentionally over-priced, intentionally under-compatible Mac software. I would, however, like to write playlist makers for Songbird or Amarok, when I feel a little more bored of learning more PHP and MySQL and want to learn whatever it is I need to learn to write real programs.


(Updated to fix links. Check for new playlist makers and updates on my code page.)