Non-latin characters in m3u playlist = empty playlist?

MP3 players Sansa Clip | Clip+
1

Hi,

I noticed a problem with m3u playlists in Sansa Clip. Whenever a filename of a song in the playlists contains a character like á in “Amália” (or other accented characters, polish characters like ą, ę, ć, etc.), the playlist will appear as empty. If only the playlist name contains such characters, it will also appear empty.

Have any of you experienced such problem? If it’s a fault in player firmware, it would be quite worth fixing.

2

You should save your playlists as m3u8 , which are stored in Unicode (UTF-8). The Clip seems to support them just fine. :smiley:

Creating an m3u playlist will store international characters as question marks (e.g. “Amália” becomes “Am?lia” ).

Message Edited by eliasf on 10-29-2008 12:03 AM

3

Thanks, it indeed helped - didn’t know about m3u8 :slight_smile: My m3u files didn’t contain question marks, but still the Clip would not read them properly. I guess it depends on the codepage in use whether you see question marks, boxes, other strange things or proper characters :wink:

Today I even found a thread similar to mine on Sansa forums (could have searched other forums than Clip - sorry). One important thing I learned from that thread:

Save your m3u8 as UTF-8 files without BOM (Byte order mark) - otherwise Clip will be confused and will show the list as empty.

So now waiting for you, elias, to introduce m3u8 to AutoM3U :slight_smile:

4

Great Program, thanx a lot. Unfortunately doesn’t start in Vista.

5

LosPiratos, try installing the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86). The program works on Win2K, XP and Vista.

6

The Solution does NOT work for me. I am learning Russian (Cyrillic) and listen to a lot of russian music lately. I have tagged all my MP3s with ID3v2.3 only. Sansa Clip with latest firmware 2.01.16f, set to MSC mode. When i follow eliasf’s solution and save my playlist with extension m3u8 and UTF-8 encoded without BOM the playlist appears and plays, BUT the EXTINF information is not displayed. One will see the filenames instead. :frowning: No problems displaying cyrillic characters from the tags though.

  • the playlist (download, or switch to UTF-8 in browser): m3u8
  • that’s how the playlist appears: photo
  • playlist in my editor (encoding info in lower right corner): screenshot

Hope someone has another tip for me how to solve this problem.

Thx,

11110111011

7

You can use the tool Generateplaylist to generate Playlist in the m3u8 Format. It is very simple and works fine on my sansa fuze. You have only to select the folder that contains the mp3 files, to set the name for the list and press the generate button. The tool generate the playlist in the selected folder.