Playlist formats

[olderguy]

Just to close out this thread with what eventually worked for me: I did switch from WMP to Winamp which I find easier to use as suggested. I loaded my music collection onto a (blank) USB thumb drive and then loaded Winamp from there. Then I composed playlists in Winamp and from its File tab selected Save Playlist which brought up a dialog box. The default file type was .M3u8 which didn’t work for me. .M3u did work in my Ford Fusion; I didn’t try any of the other formats.  Placing the playlist file in a /Playlists folder on the thumb drive didn’t work for me (I think WMP was doing that?).  My Ford showed the playlist name but said it was empty.  Placing the playlist file in the root directory of the thumb drive worked although I couldn’t find any way to easily display playlists on the Ford’s touch screen.  I actually had to use the Sync voice command “Show Playlists” to have them show up on the touch screen.  And I could only do that after the Ford was done “Indexing Device” and “Creating Commands” which takes several minutes with about 1450 tunes on the thumb drive.  Hopefully that wait reduces when I begin to leave the drive plugged into the car.  What a struggle!  Many thanks to Black-Rectangle and Tapeworm for their expert advice!  Oldguy