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Sue Center relies on winamp to play music.

MP3

Winamp understands several formats but the major one is mp3. You must convert your music tracks on CDs to mp3 files. This can be done in several ways. I recommend this free CD ripper:

http://www.freerip.com

Place your mp3 files in the following folder:

C:\SueCenterData\Music

You can also put files in a subfolder of the Music folder named after the album or artist.

Playlists

Playlists are plain text files that live in:

C:\SueCenterData\browse.dir\Playlists

Each line of a playlist text file is the path to an mp3 file. The path begins at the above Music folder. For example if we have these mp3 files:

Music\Bach\Goldberg.mp3
Music\Bach\Brandenberg.mp3

and

Music\Elvis\BlueSuede.mp3

Then we can have a playlist (in the browse.dir\Playlist folder) called Bach.txt like so:

Bach\Goldberg.mp3
Bach\Brandenberg.mp3

and one called Favs.txt:

Bach\Goldberg.mp3
Elvis\BlueSuede.mp3

Note that you can have a hierarchy of playlists organized under folders. For example:

Playlists\Rock\
    Beatles.txt
    LedZeppelin.txt
    RadioHead.txt
Playlists\Classical\
    Beethoven\
        Emperor.txt
        Appassionata.txt
    Ives\
        Concord.txt
        4th of July.txt

Automatic Playlists

After ripping a CD into a subfolder of the Music folder you can invoke Sue Center and enter "MKPL" in the message area. Pressing "Go" at this point will then search the Music folder for newly added subfolders and create a playlist for them - named the same as the subfolder. "MKPL" stands for "make playlist". This is much easier than creating the playlists by hand.

Internet Radio Stations

Sue Center can also play internet radio stations. These are simple text files in the Playlist folder containing one line - the URL of the radio station. It is easy to add new ones:

1. Visit www.shoutcast.com.
2. Browse around that site, searching for the type of station you wish.
3. Listen to the station by clicking on "Tune In!".
4. When you find one that you wish to have in Sue Center right click on "Tune In!" and select "Copy Shortcut".
5. Create a new text file (appropriately named) in Playlists and paste the shortcut into the first line.
6. That's it. You now have a new radio station in Sue Center.
7. Unfortunately, it seems that the URLs to these radio stations keep changing. At some point ones you have added may not work any more. If this happens you need to delete them and re-add.