Playlist [Empty] - 2021 update - almost solved

SanDisk MP3 players SanDisk® Clip Sport Plus
#1

This is the dreaded [Empty] message when adding a playlist but it appears as [Empty] when selecting it in the player. I’ve looked into this and have discovered why so many people are having problems. Attached are two .m3u8 playlist files - one works, one doesn’t. And yet they both have exactly the same content! DW6b.m3u8 works and loads tracks perfectly but DW6c.m3u8 does not. They are both encoded in utf-8 but their size shows a difference of 29 bytes. Could someone with more technical knowledge look into why DW6b works fine?

DW6c.m3u8 (1.2 KB) DW6b.m3u8 (1.2 KB)

NB - DW6b was created using a separate program, DW6c using TextEdit in Mac OS X. There is some difference which is not in the actual content of the file but I don’t have access to the program which created DW6b.

Also, I have looked into all solutions at M3U playlist empty and Simple Batch File for Playlist of All Files on Micro SD Card but these do not work for me.

FW v2.20.B01

Thanks.

#2

Ah figured it out! DW6c is using LF (Unix) line endings. When I edited the file in Atom (free Mac app) and saved it using CRLF (Windows) line endings, it worked!
The playlist file is simply a list of the music tracks (as you can see if you open up the files above in a text editor). Hopefully this might help others! :grinning:

(This level of technical knowledge really shouldn’t be needed for end users so if there are any moderators seeing this, please let me know how I can pass this on to the technical team. Thanks)

#3

Congratulations on your discovery. I think using OSX to create homebrew Playlist files is the main problem. I do not hold SanDisk responsible for a quirk of OSX. Here is a link to a similar discussion and the same solution in the SanDisk Forum way back in 2017.

“CRLF line endings required in Playlist m3u files”
https://forums.sandisk.com/t/random-problem-in-playlists/68672/12

1 Like
#4

Ah yes! You and others seem to have figured it out long before me. Well done. I thought I’d searched the forums comprehensively but it seems not. It does feel that the market share of OS X is now sizeable enough that a relatively simple bug like this could be solved with a firmware update.
Regardless, good to know the knowledge is already out there!

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