Creating Playlists with my Sansa Fuze 4GB

I transferred about 4 or 5 playlists to my Sansa Fuze 4GB in M3U format, and the playlists show up in my player, but when I go to play them, there are no songs??? The Songs in the playlist are in mp3 format. Can anyone shine some light of my situation? Help please?

Are you putting the .m3u playlist file in the MUSIC folder? Does the name of the playlist show in the PLAYLIST menu?

If it does, and you’re getting an [empty] response when trying to play it, then the path to the music is wrong meaning the player can’t find the songs. You have to create the playlist from the songs located on the player, not from the ones located on your computer.

I made the playlists on my computer, then put them on my Fuze. I put them into the folder labeled “Playlists”, not the “Music” folder…the name of the playlist name shows up in the playlists, but they are empty.

@kristinalafay wrote:
I made the playlists on my computer, then put them on my Fuze. I put them into the folder labeled “Playlists”, not the “Music” folder…the name of the playlist name shows up in the playlists, but they are empty.

As I said, the playlist(s) must be populated from songs on your Fuze, not the computer for the path to be correct. Also, .m3u playlist files must be placed in the Music folder that contains the music. Although placing it in the root (main) directory has been said to work too.

PLA format playlists are the only format that will work when placed in the PLAYLISTS folder. :smiley:

@tapeworm wrote:


@kristinalafay wrote:
I made the playlists on my computer, then put them on my Fuze. I put them into the folder labeled “Playlists”, not the “Music” folder…the name of the playlist name shows up in the playlists, but they are empty.


 

As I said, the playlist(s) must be populated from songs on your Fuze, not the computer for the path to be correct. Also, .m3u playlist files must be placed in the Music folder that contains the music. Although placing it in the root (main) directory has been said to work too.

 

PLA format playlists are the only format that will work when placed in the PLAYLISTS folder. :smiley:

Tapeworm, this is not quite true. I put my m3u playlists under the PLAYLISTS folder and they work as expected. The only thing you have to be aware of is the correct pathing as you pointed out already. To put it simply, here is the content of the example.m3u playlist:

..\MUSIC\CD\Artist1\Album1\01-My\_first\_song.mp3 ..\MUSIC\CD\Artist1\Album2\99-My\_last\_song.mp3

kristinalafay,

you could check the content of your playlist on the Fuze via NotePad from the PC (or any other text editor available). The path of any entry in the playlist must exactly point from the location of the playlist to the music file. If not, the playlist won’t work. In this case you could simply edit the playlist in your text editor. If you do so, I’d suggest you start with a very simple playlist of 2 or 3 entries only.

Most GUI programs for playlist generation have plenty of settings. You might have to adopt path settings here. As I’m not using any such program I can’t tell you where to look. But there are other helpful people around who are familiar with WMP and alike.

Hey,

I’ve been looking at pages like this since yesterday, and i’ve tried almost everything people have said, including changing the USB mode between MTP (even though i read somewhere it wont work on Linux, which im running), making sure it is an .m3u file, putting it in the root directory, music directory, and trying to write the playlist with the program Emacs (which, may have been a failure on my part, but it also showed up on the player) and making sure i made the playlist from my fuze instead of from the computer, but it still says it is “empty”. Does anyone have ANY ideas about this? I can use either Banshee or Rhythmbox or Amarok. Anything would be great : )

The issue with playlists being “blank” is due to how Linux is writing the playlist files to the Fuze.

Your music management software (in my case Banshee) is creating playlists by writing .m3u files into the MUSIC directory on the Fuze.  It formats the m3u files like this:

MUSIC/<artist>/<song>

The problem is that this is a Linux absolute file path. What the Fuze wants is a Windows relative file path.

What you need to do is load your playlist file(s) into a text editor, and use find/replace to modify the entries in the file.  They need to look like this:

<artist>\<song>

Note that the path is now relative to where the m3u files actually are, and that it uses the Windows backslash delimiter instead of the Linux forward slash.

Once you’ve edited your playlist files, set your file manager to show hidden files on your Fuze.  Ensure that your text editor didn’t create a backup copy of the files you just edited (the standard Ubuntu Text Editor program does this by default).  If it did, delete them.  If you don’t, then two copies of each playlist will appear in your Fuze, with only one of them working.

Now eject your Fuze, let it scan your music, and bask in the glow that is working playlists.

FWIW, I reported this “bug” to the Banshee folks via Bugzilla back in Feburary, and it was confirmed by another user.  No fix yet (that I know of).

Message Edited by themrfreeze on 05-31-2010 10:07 PM