Format of m3u8 files

MP3 players Sansa Clip | Clip+
1

I’m looking for the format of m3u8 files so I can maually create playlists of songs with special characters in them. Manually creating m3u files is no problem for me. I just create a file called playlist.m3u that look something like this:

#EXTM3U song1.mp3 song3.ogg

Without the header & extension, “file playlist.m3u” identifies this as:

playlist.txt: ASCII text

Now I create a file called playlist.m3u8 that look something like this:

#EXTM3U song1.mp3 fußball.mp3 song3.ogg

Without the header & extension, “file playlist.m3u8” identifies this as:

playlist.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text

Sounds good, but when I bring it up on the clip only the 1st & 3rd songs are listed. Something is missing in this format. Anyone know what it could be? Even though the file is UTF-8 it is still treated like an m3u file instead of an m3u8 file.

I also noticed that special characters don’t display properly in the playlist filename itself. I assume this is due to the file system on the clip and is unrelated to the problem listed above.

2

I’ve been playing around a little bit with these playlists in M3U8 format and this is what I’ve ascertained so far:

  1. The name of the playlist file must still be ASCII.  If it is UTF-8, the special characters will be messed up when you view it on the Clip.  They look fine from the computer but no when viewed on the playlist menu of the Clip.
  2. The file name of the songs must also be standard 7 bit ASCII characters.  They cannot be UTF-8 or they won’t even show up in the playlist when you parse through it.
  3. Only the „EXTINF“ extra information can be UTF-8 characters.  These will be displayed correctly on the Clip.  Just make sure you convert the file names of the songs to 7 bit ASCII text or you won’t see the song at all in the playlist.

Here is an example entry in an m3u8 file that I got to work on my Clip:

#EXTM3U #EXTINF:186,Die Räuber - Fußball Fieber MUSIC\Schlager\02 - Die Raeuber - Fussball Fieber.ogg

If anyone has gotten UTF-8 to work on filenames in playlists on the Clip, I’d like to hear how you did it.  These files still work on the clip and they even display correctly from the computer, but they just don’t show up in the playlist.

My Info:

I’m using a Sansa Clip with firmware version V1.1.35A.

All files are loaded in MSC mode.

3

This is very informative :smiley: