I have about pulled out the hair I have left on my head trying to create playlists on a USB jump drive loaded with my MP3 music. I tried multiple USB drives, both iTunes and Windows Media Player but the result was the same - unreliable reading of the playlists. It was hit & miss if my truck's system could find the tracks or not - Mostly miss. For some reason it cannot find certain MP3 files from the playlist but can find others. Don't know if it's a bug with SYNC3 or if there is something about the files that SYNC3 doesn't like - the way the files are named? The folder structure? What??? Something is affecting the playlists - and the playlists only. Otherwise SYNC3 can index the drive and find everything just fine, just not from a playlist. And I don't know if it's my particular truck or if it's a broader problem with SYNC3. I did find one instance where someone else was having similar issues with their playlists using SYNC3. I tried various lengths of playlists and nothing worked - some lists with 50 songs might only show 2-3, others might show more. Once I made a list that not one song would show up on. There was no rym or reason.

I like a playlist so I don't have to be constantly picking something to play. My work around was to create a new folder on the USB drive and give it the name of the playlist I was creating. Then I copied each song file I wanted on the list into that folder (I didn't just move them...). The last thing I did was use iTunes to change the ID3 info inside of the file so that the album name is the name of the playlist. That's easy enough to do in bulk with iTunes - just multi-select all of the files in the "playlist" folder then do a "get info" for them. A dialog box with all the different data fields will open - ONLY CHANGE THE ALBUM TITLE to be the name of the "playlist". When you're ready to listen to that group of music select it from the ALBUMS listing - I name it starting with "AAA****) so that it will be at the very top of the list of albums.

I've gotten to where when I remove the USB drive and do any editing on it that I change the name of the drive - I make it easy on myself and use a name something like USBDRIVE_001 - the next time I change something on that drive I change the name next to USBDRIVE_002. That way SYNC3 should re-index the drive so it finds the changes I've made.

Probably crude but it works. My USB drive is a 65 GB and I only had about 35 GB of music on it. I created a regular playlist that had about 400 songs and *MAYBE* 50-60 of them would show up. Now I have a folder with those same 400 songs and still have plenty of drive space - all 400 songs shows up too.

Maybe my hair might start growing back now.

 

I found a reliable way of making playlist work for USB. See here:

https://www.f150forum.com/showpost.php?p=5267206&postcount=13

 

AS the title says,SYNC3 has limitations with how it reads USB playlists — it often doesn’t recognize M3U files unless they’re formatted in a very specific way. So even if you export a playlist from MusConvtool, you might still need to manually adjust the file paths in the playlist, ensure they match the audio files on your USB, and possibly apply the known SYNC3 workarounds (like using relative paths, proper encoding, etc.).

So, while MusConv helps you get the playlist out of your music service, the SYNC3 workaround helps make that playlist actually usable in your car.