flg8rfan

I know I'm committing a cardinal sin and will get the typical 'use the search feature' comments, but this is been driving me nuts. I'm an IT guy so I'm probably overthinking things. Every google search I do just takes me to the same topics that haven't helped, which is funny since every link it about what I'm pretty much trying to do....


Short and sweet. Trying to get playlists set up on my USB flash drive.


64GB flash drive, formatted FAT32. I'm using iTunes SYNC to sync my library with the flash drive and tried playlist exporters in addition to exporting from iTunesFolder structure is as follows:
Artist
Album
MP3's (or whatever)


Indexes fine, can call up anything by voice (pretty impressed with the recognition capabilities)


Exporting playlists never works, no matter what 'suggested' application I use. I understand relative paths and all that jazz. I've opened up the playlists in notepad to view/edit. Sample below:


Destiny's Child\The Writing's On The Wall\12 Say My Name.mp3
Eminem\The Marshall Mathers LP2\12 The Monster (feat. Rihanna) 1.m4a
Eminem\Recovery\15 Love the Way You Lie (feat. Rihan 1.m4a


I've tried preceding each line with a "\", "..\" - no difference.


Could someone tell me what their working playlists look like (open in notepad, not word)? I can't believe that it's an 8.3 format issue or because ALL of the MP3's aren't at the root of the flash drive (that would be a PITA with 3800 songs....


I'd much rather use a $40 flash drive than a bargain MP3 player or buy an iPOD with the capacity I need.

Milton6001

Mine are .m3u playlists. I used this http://oddgravity.de/app-opc.php which was recommended on a Focus site. It does not recognize .m4a files, other than that it worked great. The playlists are in the top level of the thumb drive.

On a side note, you can copy your entire itunes directory to you thumb drive and sync will play the songs in the correct album order. Every other way that I have tried without playlists causes them to be played in alphabetical order.

Sync suck. I don't care if the voice feature works or not, I hate it.

flg8rfan

K, grabbed a smaller USB, threw a few songs on there and edited/created numerous playlists (all with the same extension)


playlists were the same except for the following:


Preceded with:
\
..\
music\ (one of the 'suggested' freeware applications did that to the playlists so I figured why not)


and preceded (and ended with "):
"\
"..\
"music\


popped the drive in, tried each playlist and the one that worked was the one (which I've tried a bazillion times and in different playlists) which just preceded with a \


The error I get on all of my other attempts is 'Playlist is empty'


Suggestions? The playlist that worked had a few special characters (.,!_) in the filename along with spaces.

flg8rfan

Mine are M3U as well (seems to be the consensus among everything I found as what works). playlists are at the root of the drive (no problem pulling them up)


I do have M4A files and they were on the playlist that worked from my update.


Couple of thoughts I have:
- length of entry limit (I know Sync is a MS product, haven't checked to see if any entries are over the 255ish character limit for fat32 filesystem)
- special character that shouldn't be used on an entry somewhere in one of my playlists

Milton6001

Here is what one of my .m3u playlists looks like in note pad (I have no idea what the numbers are for):

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:285,Alice in Chains - 1 - Grind
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\1 Grind.wma
#EXTINF:202,Alice in Chains - 2 - Brush Away
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\2 Brush Away.wma
#EXTINF:432,Alice in Chains - 3 - Sludge Factory
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\3 Sludge Factory.wma
#EXTINF:327,Alice in Chains - 4 - Heaven Beside You
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\4 Heaven Beside You.wma
#EXTINF:388,Alice in Chains - 5 - Head Creeps
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\5 Head Creeps.wma
#EXTINF:245,Alice in Chains - 6 - Again
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\6 Again.wma
#EXTINF:335,Alice in Chains - 7 - Shame in You
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\7 Shame in You.wma
#EXTINF:248,Alice in Chains - 8 - God Am
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\8 God Am.wma
#EXTINF:165,Alice in Chains - 9 - So Close
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\9 So Close.wma
#EXTINF:340,Alice in Chains - 10 - Nothin' Song
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\10 Nothin' Song.wma
#EXTINF:498,Alice in Chains - 11 - Frogs
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\11 Frogs.wma
#EXTINF:423,Alice in Chains - 12 - Over Now
D:\Alice in Chains\Alice in Chains\12 Over Now.wma

Milton6001

I bet the numbers are for the length of the track...???

flg8rfan

k, going to try and figure out what the numbers mean, it's been a while but I think # at the beginning means that the OS is to ignore what follows (used for commenting in programming so you can tell the guy behind you what that line was supposed to do, kinda like REM and ' )


I appreciate you posting that, that gives me something more to work with....

flg8rfan

I think that might be the issue to be honest. Easy enough to find, pain to have to do every time I update my playlist though....

flg8rfan

even with the short playlist, it only loads the last artist.......

scole

I'll +1 Milton's suggestion about oddgravity Playlist Creator. It's what I used with success. This link has the process I followed.

Good luck!

Steve