Playlists for music on SD Card?

[Pbrowne]

I have music on a 32 GB SD card organized in folders by genre, then album or artist so that I can easily find something. Now I want to create playlists to combine music from several albums. I'd like to be able to play one album or a combination of albums and/or songs. I use iTunes on a Windows PC. I know how to copy the music organized in a usable way, but playlists would be ever so helpful.

I have and use an iPhone that has playlists, but it does not have enough memory to hold as much of my music library as I would like.

I've searched the internet without finding any simple solution. Ideas? (Solutions for creating playlists on the SD card only, please!)

 

[carterruss]

Not sure how your music is on your computer but if you have the files you can copy them into specific folders (which will be your playlists) and dump those folders onto the SD card.

 

[the bruce]

RTFM - you can even do it online.

Playlists require M3U, PLS, ASX or WPL format, not exceeding 20 kB
and 1000 titles, and filename no more than 256 characters.

Probably something wrong with one of these.

Btw, if your SD is 32 GB, it needs to be SDHC. According to manual
Composition Media & Discover Media will play ordinary SD cards just
up to 2 GB max. I don't know if in real life it also does accept bigger
contents.

Personally I miss FLAC and iso/dsf formats, as I have lots of them,
but feeding an SD or USB stick with mp3 is easy pickings anyway.

 

[Pbrowne]

Let me clarify. I have copied the songs and albums that I wanted from my Windows PC into folders by genre, then by album. I just want to create playlists.

 

[pjr]

It is possible to do, but a little involved. What I'm explaining below has been done from memory, but should give you a start.

I also use iTunes on a Windows PC, and already had some playlists created within iTunes.

On my PC my music was in d:/iPod music/artist name/album name/song name.mp3

I copied all the folders from my PC to the SD card with everything except the /iPod music/ folder level. So, on my SD card the folders were artist name/album name/song name.mp3

From iTunes, I exported the required playlists which created a .m3u file which I then had to edit in notepad to remove all the d:/iPod music/ text from the start of each line within the .m3u file

The edited .m3u file was then copied to the root of the SD card (it can't be put in a folder)

The car should be able to read the .m3u file and pick up the required fields from the folders on the SD card.

There was a little trial and error getting the right format, but it worked in the end. For it to work, the folder structure on the PC and SD card does need to be quite similar.

 

[Pbrowne]

Thanks, PJR!

 

[jammin1]

Is there any way you could PM me an example of a working M3U file or a snippet of one in this thread. I have made a few attempts and have not been successful in getting the system recognizing the file properly. It puts a message "No Playable Files Found" on the display when I select the file from the list. I removed all of the specific locations and left the file with relative references as suggested. The file is in the root of the disk as well.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Pbrowne]

I was unsuccessful as well. What I did was to arrange my music and other audio files in folders similar to my playlists. For example, the "Irish" folder contains all of my Irish albums as subfiolders. I did the same for Christmas, Classical, etc. If I play the first song, it works just like a playlist.

 

[mwaites]

Is there any way you could PM me an example of a working M3U file or a snippet of one in this thread. I have made a few attempts and have not been successful in getting the system recognizing the file properly. It puts a message "No Playable Files Found" on the display when I select the file from the list. I removed all of the specific locations and left the file with relative references as suggested. The file is in the root of the disk as well.

Thanks in advance.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:178,I'm Eighteen - Alice Cooper
\Music\Alice Cooper\Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits\01 I'm Eighteen.m4a
#EXTINF:322,Whipping Post - The Allman Brothers Band
\Music\Compilations\Beginnings\07 Whipping Post.m4a
#EXTINF:136,My Boyfriends Back - The Angels
\Music\Compilations\Sun Jamming (Disc 2)\2-02 My Boyfriends Back.m4a
#EXTINF:256,Can't Get Enough - Bad Company
\Music\Bad Company\Bad Company\01 Can't Get Enough.m4a
#EXTINF:215,She's Crafty - Beastie Boys
\Music\Beastie Boys\Licensed To Ill\03 She's Crafty.m4a

 

[ZenBoy]

Is there any way you could PM me an example of a working M3U file or a snippet of one in this thread. I have made a few attempts and have not been successful in getting the system recognizing the file properly. It puts a message "No Playable Files Found" on the display when I select the file from the list. I removed all of the specific locations and left the file with relative references as suggested. The file is in the root of the disk as well.

Thanks in advance.

Jammin1, did you ever resolve this? I'm having the same issue with playlist (M3U format) construction, for folder structure and path names inside the playlist.

Some have said that creating a folder named "Music" at the root level of the SD card, with all artist folders inside it, is best. Others have all artist folders at the root level of the SD card.

There also seems to be disagreement whether the path names in the playlist file need to have forward "/" or backward "\" slashes.

I've constructed my playlist as shown above by mwaites, both trying with forward slashes and backslashes, and both with and without a "Music" folder at the root of the SD card:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:178,I'm Eighteen - Alice Cooper
\Music\Alice Cooper\Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits\01 I'm Eighteen.m4a
#EXTINF:322,Whipping Post - The Allman Brothers Band
\Music\Compilations\Beginnings\07 Whipping Post.m4a

I can play music files and browse all folders, but playlists have yet to work for me after trying multiple folder structure and syntax variants; it only results in "No Playable Files Found" on the display when the playlist is selected.

Any thoughts/suggestions are appreciated greatly!

 

[KevinC]

Semi-OT - if anyone is on a Mac and needs to do this, there's a $5 tool in the App Store called Export for iTunes that completely automates playlist export - you simply export your iTunes playlists with it (as well as your albums or any other way you want to export songs) and it auto-magically corrects the playlists to point to the correct file locations on your SD card. Super-slick and makes updating your card a breeze at any time.

 

[mr wrong]

...And for anyone not using iTunes there's a pretty robust desktop music manager call 'Music Bee' that I use for my SD card, and Android phone.

I'm not affiliated in any way just providing an alternative..

 

[kevinkar]

I have this working on my '18 R using a 512GB SD card (SanDisk Extreme Pro 512 GB SDXC UHS-I Card (SDSDXPA-512G-G46).)

Music is on the card in folders labeled 0-10 (for bands with numbers in their names) and on through A-B, C-D, etc. so that the folders adhere to the "rules" in the owner's manual which is "Maximum of 1,000 folders and 30,000 files on a data carrier." So you have to make sure you have less than 1000 folders. I had to take the time to get that right but I have all my music on one SD card. Even though the manual says a max of 256GB, a 512GB card works in my car at least.

My playlist files also follow the "rules" (Playlists no larger than 20 KB and with no more than 1,000 entries.) but I can't get more than about 180 songs listed before I go over 20kb! So I have lots of playlist files because I have about 18,000 songs on my SD card.

My playlist files look like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:212,Colvin, Shawn - I Don't Know You
\Co-Cu\Colvin, Shawn\All Fall Down\08 I Don't Know You.flac
#EXTINF:199,Dance Hall Crashers - Whiskey & Gin
\Da-De\Dance Hall Crashers\Honey, I'm Homely!\08 Whiskey & Gin.flac
#EXTINF:244,Camera Obscura - Tears for Affairs
\Ca-Cl\Camera Obscura\Let's Get Out of This Country\02 Tears for Affairs.mp3

So my file is different from mwaites' in that my #EXTINF lines are "artist - song" rather than "song - artist". Notice my playlists are randomized so they are not in 100% alphabetical order which is why you see this snippet of 3 songs all pointing to different folders. And my folders/songs are "alphabet folder"\Artist\Album\Song.

Don't forget to name the file filename.m3u or m3u8, not .txt. Mine are m3u8 as I used Winamp to create the lists and that's what it saves. I created a playlist of all songs and used Excel to figure out a way to randomize the entire list (the random function in this car sucks) and, after getting that done, I forgot to rename them from .txt and got "no playable files found" but renamed them properly back to m3u8 and the playlists show up at the bottom of the list of folders when viewing the root of the SD card. Just select one and it plays.

Definitely not easy but it does work. 180 songs per playlist is about 9 hours of music and, as far as I can tell, even though the playlists are already randomized, I believe I can select a playlist and press the random button and randomize them more. But for now I'll let them play in the order I randomized them.

 

[rld7]

I was also having the "No Playable Files Found" problem. I finally tracked it down. For me, I had exported my .m3u playlists from iTunes on a Mac. It put ctrl-M (^M) characters at the end of each line. I had to go into a text editor and replace them all with regular line-feed or carriage returns, then the playlists song lists were recognized.