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Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist

Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 4:36 am
by Daz
Hi may be having brain fart here :D probably something simple I'm doing wrong.

I have created a .m3u playlist in VLC and then copied it into the root drive of the "Watched Folders" It displays the name of the playlist under "Playlists" but indicates zero tracks.

The playlist works if I open it in VLC, what am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any help.

Re: Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist

Posted: Sat May 23, 2020 5:38 am
by Daz
Had another go but no success.

This is an extract from the Log..

Processing playlist - /sharedir/Music/Daz Playlist.m3u
Playlist Name: Daz Playlist
Playlist Trackcount: 144
File not found: /sharedir/Music/2020/14.02.2020%20Chart%20Hits%20UK/12.%20Halsey%20-%20You%20should%20be%20sad.mp3
File not found: /sharedir/Music/2020/NOW%20That's%20What%20I%20Call%20Music%20Today's%20Top%20Hits%20(2020)%20Mp3%20320kbps/25.%20Lauren%20Daigle%20-%20You%20Say.mp3
File not found: /sharedir/Music/2020/NOW%20That's%20What%20I%20Call%20Music%20Today's%20Top%20Hits%20(2020)%20Mp3%20320kbps/43.%20Taylor%20Swift%20-%20You%20Need%20To%20Calm%20Down.mp3

There are albums with playlists in there that I didn't create (already setp) but seem to work.

Success: /sharedir/Music/2014/2014 16 The Official UK Top 40 Singles Chart 16.02.2014/01 Clean Bandit Feat Jess Glynne - Rather Be.mp3
Success: /sharedir/Music/2014/2014 16 The Official UK Top 40 Singles Chart 16.02.2014/02 Pharrell Williams - Happy.mp3
Success: /sharedir/Music/2014/2014 16 The Official UK Top 40 Singles Chart 16.02.2014/02 Zedd Feat Hayley Williams - Stay The Night.mp3

Re: Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist

Posted: Sat May 23, 2020 5:59 am
by bizmodeller
So it’s the URI encoding that is breaking it. My understanding of the spec is that filename in playlist files should be plain file names not URI encoded ones.

That said we could look at falling back to find a uri encoded path if finding the plain text one failed.

Let me try to reproduce

Re: Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2020 5:23 pm
by TomTiddler
..................."Re: Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist
Unread post by bizmodeller » Sat May 23, 2020 1:59 am

So it’s the URI encoding that is breaking it. My understanding of the spec is that filename in playlist files should be plain file names not URI encoded ones.

That said we could look at falling back to find a uri encoded path if finding the plain text one failed.

Let me try to reproduce"..................

I would love it if this were the fallback!!

Re: Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist

Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2020 8:34 pm
by Synaps
Was there a solution to this?
I am having the same issue, my playlists that work in VLC show up but have 0 tracks.
I too have working playlists that were in the original album folders which all work, I have copied one of these into the parent folder and it then shows 0 tracks.
My playlists include tracks from multiple album folders so the playlist can't be with all the tracks.
Any help appriciated.

Re: Creating & Reading .m3u Playlist

Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2020 3:56 am
by howgreen44
Each entry in your play list must include the path to the location of the mp3 file in the watched folder, e.g., if you want to play "myfavoritesong.mp3" that is located in the folder "my favorite album" and located in the directory "mymusicforalexa" each listing in your m3u file must be as follows:

/mymusicforalexa/my favorite album/myfavoritesong.mp3


m3u files are text files. You can open them in any text editor. I use Wordpad in Windows because it has a simple search and replace function. You can use any word processing program as long as you save the m3u file in the most basic text format; make sure it has the .m3u extension.