Playlist Format Hell

by Bob Seidel

Continuing the story on my new Dell DJ30 MP3 player…

I really love this thing. What is cool is that I now have my entire music collection in the palm of my hand. I use it at night in the bedroom for go-to-sleep music, in all my cars, and for treadmilling. CDs are a thing of the past.

But I did run into one problem - I found myself in Playlist Format Hell!

What is a playlist? Very simply, it's just a list of songs to be played in a particular order. Most music programs allow you to create playlists, and to me that is key to enjoying your music. The playlists you create do not have to follow the album song order, and they can play songs from more than one album. This allows you to create your own custom song mixes - I have quiet go-to-sleep playlists, treadmill playlists that rock, etc. Since the very beginning of my ripping of digital music onto my PC, I have created and used playlists; as you might imagine, I have lots and lots of them.

Now the problem: The original playlist format was called M3U, and most PC music file player programs supported this format. An M3U file is simply just a list of the fully qualified file names of the music files to be played. The player that I liked to use in the past, MusicMatch, both created and played M3U files just fine. I purchased a number of MM versions over the years, but MM took a strategic turn a few years ago when it was one of the first companies trying to get into the online music sales business. They took what was an excellent and well-regarded player and messed it up trying to sell you stuff. There is a newer version that comes with the Dell DJ30, but it is a crappy and cranky as it ever was.

Because of my unhappiness with MM, I decided to switch to the (free) Microsoft Windows Media Player about a year ago. WMP in its latest incarnation (version 10) is a very mature and capable program. I found, to my pleasure, that WMP supported reading and writing of M3U files - so all my old playlists were usable as-is. Time marched on.

When I got my DJ30, of course I quickly downloaded all my song files into it. WMP did this with no problem. However, it didn't download my playlists. Calling Dell support, I found that the only program that would do this was MM, which came supplied with the DJ30. What to do? I decided to use WMP to do all my normal music work, and just use MM to download to the player. Did that, seemed to work fine. But I found that some of the playlists worked, and some seemed empty.

Investigation revealed that WMP uses an expanded form of the M3U format, and that new form is not compatible with MM or the DJ30! My old standard M3U playlists worked fine, but anything created via WMP was in the new format and didn't work.

Looking at the new M3U format, I saw that the information I wanted was there, but just needed to be tweaked a bit. Now came a dilemma for me: back in my old, daily recreational programmer days, I could have written a utility program to perform the change in well under an hour - no big deal. I even could have done it with a special programmable editor program that I wrote way back when. But since retired, I don't do any more programming, and had no other tools to do the job.

Luckily, I found a shareware program on the Internet that would do. It was a file editor that had a lot of nifty keyword search and replace options. It also had a file search feature, so that I could automatically identify the files that needed conversion, and do the conversion efficiently.

So, all is converted now, and I am enjoying my player. But I sure wish there was more standardization in the music business, and I wish that WMP (or whoever invented the newer M3U format) had chosen to use a different file type instead of M3U, thus making it easier to spot the different format files. Anyhow, all's well that ends well!

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)