I was having trouble getting playlists to work on a USB Memory Stick. The music would play but not the playlists. I'm running windows XP and use Windows Media Player to create my playlists.
I found the app SyncPlaylist online and used it to transfer my playlists and music to a USB Memory Stick and it works great now.
SyncPlaylist is free for the first 3 transfers to a USB Memory Stick after that it costs $2. You have to clean up your playlists in Windows Media Player before you copy them to the USB stick. (No missing songs)

 

Jim, Nice find! This could come in handy. I'm also assuming the $2 fee after three free playlists is to buy the app, and then you get unlimited playlists?

 

Yes, It's unlimited once you buy the app. I used it 2 times on different USB drives before I bought it. I have a 32GB USB drive on order and needed a way to load my music and playlists. It's going in the glove box when I install the USB2 mod.

 

I found that my playlists wouldnt work unless I had all my music in my 'My Music' folder (subfolders were ok too). If the files are anywhere else, it adds a pointer to the playlist telling it where to find them and it includes the drive letter...thats the part that screws up Sync from what I can tell.

so now I've got 14gb on a 16gb stick in 120 folders...and I've got like 5 playlists because I just have not made more yet.

 

Haven't tried SyncPlaylist, so I can't say how difficult this is compared to it, but I've been using Winamp for making all my playlists. Drag and drop whatever MP3s you have on a flash drive into Winamp, then save the playlist directly to the USB drive. Works great, and it's free. I've been meaning to do a write up on Sync since it's such a great system, just horribly misunderstood. I should probably get around to that soon.

 

The thing I like about SyncPlaylist is that I don't have to build new playlists I can use the ones I already have created in Windows Media Player. I searched all of the forums and tried a lot of different ways to get playlists to work but I wasn't successful. I already had a dozen playlists so I was glad when I discovered SyncPlaylist. Now when I get my 32GB USB Stick I can put all of my music and playlists on it.

 

What do you mean the playlists would not play? There were not even detected in your music library? Or they showed up but refused to play ("Invalid playlist format" error message)?

 

I just switched from using my iPod to a USB drive and have been very frustrated the playlists don't transfer over from iTunes. I tried to create playlists using Media Player but they weren't recognized by Sync. I'll have to give this program a whirl. I ended up buying a 2nd USB (micro) and use it in the USB1 place for my favorite music and then have a regular thumb drive in USB2. It would be nice to have all my playlists though.

 

I used Windows Media Player to load my USB drive and Sync could not find the playlists. I discovered that WMP did not copy them to the USB. I copied them manually and Sync found them but there were error messages. I don't remember what they were.
When I used SyncPlaylist it said that i had some missing songs in my playlists so I went back to WMP and deleted the songs that were causing the error and used SyncPlaylist to copy them to the USB drive.
The missing songs from my playlists were probably what was causing the Sync errors but I didn't realize that until I ran SyncPlaylist.
Now that my playlists are clean I probably could use WMP and manually copy my playlists to the USB drive and have it working.

 

Just tried WMP again and manually copied the playlists and Sync gave me an error "No Valid Tracks"
I think I'll stick with SyncPlaylist , it must fix the playlists when it copies to the USB Drive.