Question on .m3u files

Well, I’ve been trying to get .m3u files to work in my wife’s Fuze. 

Background~~  I’ve always hand-written my .m3u’s.  Open up notepad, type in the header, list the path to each tune; you’re done.  Easy to do, easy to edit, re-arrange, add, etc, etc, and all you need is a text editor.  Gets a little burdensome if the playlist is hundreds of tunes long, but for short ones it’s easy and fast.     

Been searching the forum for quite a while.  I wrote a one tune test .m3u to hit a single tune in the /MUSIC directory and I can’t get it to work.   

Stuff I’ve tried~~

1.  Carefully checked the spelling and path of the tune.  Had that trip me up many times before.

2.  Tried forward slashes and backslashes.

3.  Tried putting the .m3u on the root and also in the /MUSIC directory.  I see that the Fuze will find the .m3u and show it in Playlists whether you put it on the root or in the /MUSIC directory.  By the way, I did change the path depending on where I tried the playlist.  

4.  Tried saving it as a .m3u8 file.

5.  Tried saving it as a .m3u8 file and saving it as UTF-8 formatting.

It always shows up as [EMPTY] when selected on the Fuze.  I’m out of ideas.  Anyone have a suggestion? 

Here’s how the playlist looks I’ve tried on the root.  Dirt simple and nothing fancy:

#EXTM3U

Music/Name_Of_The_Tune_Right_Here.mp3

Message Edited by Lugnut on 03-20-2010 10:54 AM

No path, just filename. You also don’t need the header, although it doesn’t hurt.

Fuze doesn’t work with double-byte M3U8 format, i.e. Unicode filenames need to be transliterated to ANSI.

If you’re conversant with the commandline, and using Windows:

At Win console, enter: dir /b path > My_Playlist.m3u

If you have nested folders, enter: dir /b/s path > My_Playlist.m3u

if using /s, load m3u into Notepad, and remove parent path w/ search-replace, eg:

parent_folder\sub_folder\song.mp3  ->  sub_folder\song.mp3

No path, just filename. You also don’t need the header, although it doesn’t hurt.

Fuze doesn’t work with double-byte M3U8 format, i.e. Unicode filenames need to be transliterated to ANSI.

If you’re conversant with the commandline, and using Windows:

At Win console, enter: dir /b “path” > My_Playlist.m3u

If you have nested folders, enter: dir /b/s “path” > My_Playlist.m3u

if using /s, load m3u into Notepad, and remove parent path w/ search-replace, eg:

“parent_folder\sub_folder\song.mp3”  ->  “sub_folder\song.mp3”

Maintain double-quotes if whitespace in path or filenames.

Try

…\Music\Name_Of_The_Tune_Right_Here.mp3

You need the …\ to take you up a folder level to the root of the disk if your m3u is in the Playlists folder. The Fuze also loves backslashs.

What the heck?!  There was another message on this thread earlier today.  I was gonna come back and look at it again and it’s gone. 

Anyway . . . I tried backslashes earlier with no effect.  

Tried them again on the root, just because, but it doesn’t work.

Can’t put the test .m3u in the playlist directory because it does not display with the Fuze in MSC mode, which is the only mode I’m able to drag ‘n’ drop files into the Fuze.  The firmware prevents me from dragging the file over when in MTP mode.    Incidentally, I do understand the double dot syntax~  it means “back up one directory,” which I’d try if I could get the file into the playlist directory.

At any rate, several previous threads cautioned against putting playlists in the playlist directory for reasons never stated.   

The earlier missing response to the thread advised elimanating the header, which has no effect, and just creating the list in the \Music directory with no path.  Tried that~  put the .m3u in the \Music directory and listed a couple of tunes right there in the directory which are not buried in any subdirectories and it still doesn’t work.  I get the same [Empty] message when selecting the playlist.   

Hmmmmm . . . . . . 

The Fuze expects the comment line above each song, but doesn’t seem to require any actual information there. In other words, this .m3u works on the Fuze:

#EXTM3U
#
The Folder\Some File.mp3#
The Other Folder\Some Other File.mp3

I put my hand-crafted M3Us in the Music directory and make the paths relative to that.

Edit: Yes, backslashes are a must.

Message Edited by Peach on 03-22-2010 08:43 AM

Message Edited by Peach on 03-22-2010 08:44 AM

The Fuze expects the comment line above each song, but doesn’t seem to require any actual information there. In other words, this .m3u works on the Fuze:

#EXTM3U
#
The Folder\Some File.mp3
#
The Other Folder\Some Other File.mp3

Backslashes are mandatory. FWIW, I put my hand-crafted M3Us in the Music directory and make the paths relative to that. I doubt they have to be there, but that is where my first playlist was located when I finally got it working and I was sick of messing with it.

I haven’t seen that it requires comment lines at all.  I’ve never used them in my .m3u files.  I, too, put them right in the MUSIC folder next to the folders in question.

Ack, you’re right, it does work without. I had to mess with it a lot before I got it working, I guess I jumped to the wrong conclusion once it did.

In summary: in MUSIC directory, with backslashes, will work. Comment lines after #EXTM3U optional.

@OP: Make sure you have a blank line at the bottom of the playlist, i.e. the last entry has a <cr><lf>.

For m3u on the Fuze, I’ve found that all comments (lines with #'s) are optional, including the header. You also don’t need double-quotes for names with whitespace. There is a limit of 1000 songs, i.e. playlists w/ more than that will be truncated. Lastly, m3u can only reference songs on the same media, e.g. a m3u on internal storage can’t reference songs on the uSD card, and vice versa.

For the last, look into .pla format playlist, which is Sansa’s proprietary format. There are some playlist managers that others have mentioned that can do this. Diesel, IIRC, has written such an app for both m3u & pla format. There’s also YAPL (search this forum), and video4fuze which have similar capabilities.

If you are still struggling and are using Windows, you could search on this forum for a program I wrote called Genre Playlist Creator. If you run that it will autmatically create m3u files so you could at least check that they are working OK.

Welp, I’m giving up, before I visciously turn this Fuze into a little pile of busted plastic and silicon. 

Got busy for a few days and it took a while to get back to it, but I played with it tonight for quite a while and I still can’t get it to work.  

I tried Peach’s example exactly, putting the .m3u in the \Music directory and using relative path to a test subdirectory with a couple of tunes in it.  The subdirectory is named \Test, and contains two tunes titled Heads.mp3 and Angela.mp3.  File looks like this~~

#EXTM3U  
  
Test\Heads.mp3  
Test\Angela.mp3

. . . and it doesn’t work.

Tried it with absolute path.

Tried it with relative path with the comments.

Tried it with absolute path with the comments.

Tried updating the firmware.  

Tried using diesel’s playlist creator but I can’t even get it to open up.  (I’m running XPSP3 with a freshly installed .NET and a re-boot.  I get banged with a memory error and then “couldn’t create temporary directories” whether trying to open it on the desktop or in the Fuze.)

So, thanks for the suggestions everybody.  I’m beginning to believe it’s the device itself.   

What a P.O.S.  I’m surely gonna get something else for myself.  

Lugnut wrote:

 

Tried it with absolute path.

Tried it with relative path with the comments.

Tried it with absolute path with the comments.

Tried updating the firmware.  

Tried using diesel’s playlist creator but I can’t even get it to open up.  (I’m running XPSP3 with a freshly installed .NET and a re-boot.  I get banged with a memory error and then “couldn’t create temporary directories” whether trying to open it on the desktop or in the Fuze.)

 

So, thanks for the suggestions everybody.  I’m beginning to believe it’s the device itself.   

What a P.O.S.  I’m surely gonna get something else for myself.  

 

You seem to be ‘goin’ the long way ‘round the barn’ on this. Why not just use Winamp and these steps. Makes perfect, playable playlists every time.

At least for me. :smiley:

The thing that works for me is EasyTag. I use linux, but there is a windows version. I would recommend the following when you select “Write Playlist”:

  1. Navigate to the MUSIC directory on the Fuze, do NOT try to create it in your PC’s directory structure and edit or copy it. You can create the final product in place. I once edited files on the Fuze and produced un-deletable playlists.

  2. Select “Use relative path for files”

  3. Select “Use DOS directory separator”

  4. Put the name you want in “Use Mask” ie; if the mask is “Name” it produces the file Name.m3u in the MUSIC folder. 

Use of UTF-8 is selected under “Settings>Preferences” under EasyTag’s main menu. The newest non-beta Windows version on sourceforge.net looks to be 2.1 which doesn’t support mp4 if that matters. Also you’ll need idblib and gtk2 for which I assume there exist Windows versions. Good luck.

Sounds like a case of defective operator.

Seeing as how I never had a lick of trouble getting an .m3u to work on a Windows machine, with three different players, as well as an old Creative Nomad MuVo, I appreciate that Tom. 

Best of luck to ya in everything.  

Message Edited by Lugnut on 03-26-2010 05:31 PM

you don’t need comments, or anything.  try this:

open notepad 

enter the relative path from the Music Folder, one song per line (example System of a Down\Hypnotize\01 - Serj Tankian; Daron Malakian - Attack.mp3)

save the file as a m3u in the MUSIC folder. 

Not sure if anyone’s still monitoring this thread, but I recently got a Fuze+ to use with Ubuntu and I was having the same problems with empty playlists and I finally got one to show up on my Fuze+ and it’s NOT empty! Here’s what I have:

  1. The playlist file is moneytest.m3u

  2. The playlist file lives in the MUSIC directory on my Fuze

  3. The contents of the moneytest.m3u file are as follows:

#EXTM3U

Money.mp3

  1. The file Money.mp3 lives in the MUSIC directory on my Fuze

The moneytest playlist shows up on my Fuze on the Playlists screen, along with the “Music Go List” and the “My Top Rated” lists.

Note that I haven’t yet done any additional testing (e.g., what about using pathnames in the playlist file, can I add songs to the playlist via Rhythmbox, etc.) but after searching the internet and testing different playlist formats for 2 hours, I’m just glad to have found something that works.

Hope this is helpful for others.