DFWdude

I have search without any usable results.

I want to create a playlist of songs held within separate folders on the USB drive.

I want to use Notepad to create the playlist. I do not want to use any other 3rd party app, like youtude, iTunes, iTouch, bluetooth files on smart phone, etc.

So far, I have been able to create files named Artist.m3u (referencing the name of the artist as all the music on my USBs is organized by artist name)

The songs within the file are referenced in desired play order by album name such as:

Album 1 folder name\song name.mp3
Album 2 folder name\subfolder name\song name.mp3
Album 3 folder name\song name.mp3... etc.

The m3u file is saved in the root folder of the USB drive.

In Comand, I select the media source (USB1 or USB2, etc). Then I ask "search for playlist" and I can see the name of the m3u file. But when I select it, it responds "No files found" Saving the .m3u with a backslash before each album folder line doesn't work, either (ie... \Album 3 folder name\song name.mp3)

I realize I'm suppose to note the search hierarchy so Comand knows where to find each song. But I'm not typing it in a manner that Comand likes.

Can someone please tell me what I am missing? Is MB Comand syntax m3u or some other? Can you post a sample?

TIA

DFWdude

Nevermind. I figured it out myself.

DubVBenz

Care to share what the solution was?

pliukait

Yes, please. Can you let us know the final outcome?

DFWdude

Background…Do an advanced search in ALL Open Forums, choosing “by thread title” and enter the term “playlist” and you get 31 results, since 2006. 17 of them with fewer than 3 replies… most of those bumps by OPs, and 8 of them no replies at all. Wow, there is an amazing gap of information on the witch’s science of playlists.


The Objective…

My goal was/is to find a simple to use, commonly available method of compiling playlists to be saved to the USB or SD card, along with the music. This provides a stand-alone source of both music and playlists, not tied to extra hardware or proprietary software. (Not about to buy a used ipad or itouch, to play with itunes, etc. as some suggest) I have little need for tons of playlists, so keeping it simple is a priority for me.

Accordingly, I will reluctantly share what has worked for me, provided folks: 1) appreciate my efforts and 2) keep to themselves any negative opinions of my taste in music …


Using NOTEPAD… Not so good…

Finding the right syntax to use in NOTEPAD is proving difficult. Do to one cryptic post via search, I found that MB Comand does not need folder hierarchy to search for individual songs within an .m3u file. Use:

Songname1.mp3
Songname2.mp3, etc.

Unfortunately, Comand will only occasionally find the song (not repeatable), and usually only the first song in the list (tried using a comma at the end of each line without success). This method is also very sensitive to manually typing song titles EXACTLY. Not so easy after all. So I gave up on Notepad. Instead, I found it even easier -- and less prone to typing error -- to use Windows Media Player on your desktop or laptop PC.


Open WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER, then…

1) Pull up the album(s) desired by artist (or whatever) in the central panel.
2) Drag and Drop the desired song(s) into the playlist panel to the right.
3) To the far right of the “Save List” line, select the drop-down icon and scroll to “Save list as” (pic below). This opens up the > This PC > Music > Playlists folder on your PC.
4) Name the Playlist, then save it. The file will have a .wpl extension.
5) Finally, using Windows Explorer, go to > This PC > Music > Playlists folder, and drag-drop the playlist to the root folder of your USB or SD music card.
6) Mount the USB or SD card in your car. Power up Comand, select the media source as usual. Then use voice command to “Search for Playlist” You should see the list as named earlier. Select it and enjoy.

I hope this helps you...

TeeEl

Brilliant. Who'd have thought Windows Media Player would still be useful for something?

Whenever I get around to setting up a new thumb-drive for music I'm definitely keeping this in mind.

pliukait

OK, Thanks DFWdude! So I've created a sample playlist as per your suggestion and it create this .wpl file:

<?wpl version="1.0"?>
<smil>
<head>
<meta name="QInfo" content="KABBAGwAYgB1AG0ASQBEAEYAaQBsAGUAVAB5AHAAZ QAgAEUAcQB1AGEAbABzACAAIgBOAGkAbgBlACAAVABvAG4AaQB nAGgAdAAgAFsATABpAHYAZQBdAEIAbwBiACAAUwBlAGcAZQByA CAAJgAgAFQAaABlACAAUwBpAGwAdgBlAHIAIABCAHUAbABsAGU AdAAgAEIAYQBuAGQAbQBwADMAIgApAA==;MAA=;TABvAGMAYQB sAE0ATABTAA==;;MAAtAA==;;LQAxAA==;;;ZgBhAGwAcwBlAA ==;MAAtAA==;ZgBhAGwAcwBlAA==;MAAtAA=="/>
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Windows Media Player -- 12.0.17763.194"/>
<meta name="IsNetworkFeed" content="0"/>
<meta name="ItemCount" content="16"/>
<title>Nine Tonight [Live]</title>
</head>
<body>
<seq>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\01 Nine Tonight.mp3" tid="{0BA7F2B6-0AEE-4419-92F1-7E25490AAEEA}"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\02 Tryin&apos; To Live My Life Without Yo.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\03 You&apos;ll Accomp&apos;ny Me.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\04 Hollywood Nights.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\05 Old Time Rock &amp; Roll.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\06 Mainstreet.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\07 Against The Wind.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\08 The Fire Down Below.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\09 Her Strut.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\10 Feel Like A Number.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\11 Fire Lake.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\12 Betty Lou&apos;s Gettin&apos; Out Tonight.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\13 We&apos;ve Got Tonight.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\14 Night Moves.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\15 Rock &amp; Roll Never Forgets.mp3"/>
<media src="E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Bob Seger &amp; The Silver Bullet Band\Nine Tonight [Live]\16 Let It Rock.mp3"/>
</seq>
</body>
</smil>

Now my question is this: Where do the songs go on the SD card? How does the command player resolve the location of the actual .mp3 files?

Thanks and regards.....Pete

TeeEl

What I would do first is move the files to the location you want them on the thumb drive, and then create the playlist using those files so the WPL is created with the correct path. If you do that then I have to imagine that it would find the path correctly.

If you did that and it's still not finding the files it could be due to the ampersand you have in the path (Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band) since it's translated to &amp;. The Mercedes system may not translate it back.

DFWdude

My master music library is on my desktop PC. Within a root folder called "C:\Music" I have all the music in folders by artist, then multiple albums under each (where needed). I copy them (just the artist folders) to the SD card or USB using the same file structure.

ex.,
ABBA
AC-DC
Aerosmith
Alice Cooper
April Wine
Arcadia, etc...

That way, since you need Media Player on the PC to create the playlist, I just do so from the pc, then copy the resulting playlist to the media source desired. This way the file structures on the PC and the SD/USB are the same... so the playlist will search the same. Sorry if that wasn't clear before.

pliukait

Ah, got it. Thanks! I'll give that a try.

Ollekebolleke

It's not necessary to use Windows Media Player. Most music programs that can generate playlists (typically m3u files) also do the work. You can also use an editor like notepad but you always must must take care of some points, otherwise you'll end up with an empty playlist (or error message during reading a playlist).

Mercedes technical support could not help me with this issue, although I asked it twice. Never got an answer. So I figured it out by myself by testing.
Things you should take care of if using COMAND-APS NTG4.7:

- Use only supported audio files (mp3, wav, wma - with the COMAND NTG4.7 also m4a, flac is supported). Otherwise convert the audio files first to an appriopiate format
- Take care that the playlist is saved with unicode character coding (UTF-8). Files in ASCII can't be read and/or some audio files won't be found since naming is not correct. Note that notepad typically saves as ASCII, so it's not compatible in this mode and you must select before saving the UTF file saving mode. However, it's not necessary that the playlist contains an unicode byte order mark (BOM).
- The playlist should only contain relative paths to the audio files and absolute paths should be adapted. So all m3u entries should be like

#EXTINF:272,Rolling Stones - Angie
R\Rolling Stones\Jump Back\Rolling Stones - Angie.mp3

where R is a arbitrary subdirectory of the same directory where the playlist resides. It's also allowed that the audio file is situated in the same directory as the playlist, however it's not recommended to do so. In that case it should be like:

#EXTINF:272,Rolling Stones - Angie
Rolling Stones - Angie.mp3

- Logically the playlist is always situated in a higher directory than the referred audio files since relative upper directory mapping seems not to be supported (type ..\ ). However, it's not necessary that the playlist files are situated in the root directory. They may also be situated in a subdirectory for example \Music\MyPlaylist.m3u where also all audio files mentioned in the playlist are situated.

If the number of audio files is increasing it sometimes happens that the playlist suddenly doesn't work anymore while it did before without changing anything in the playlist. Several reasons can be the cause:

- If there are some changes on the storage device, COMAND will reread the storage device, starting with finding audio files, next finding playlists, next reading audio tags and finally checking playlist files. If any error happens during processing of the playlist files COMAND will stop processing the rest of the files and these unprocessed playlist files will become unreadible. You must solve the error in the latest processed playlist with an error and do a rescan.

- Take care that during checking the playlist the number of files / directories is "expanding". So if number of audio files is large it's possible that the maximum number of allowed files in a single directory (1000) or subdirectories (200) is exceeded. This will give a playlist processing error. Also take that the number of subdirectories levels allowed is limited (I thought up to 9 levels). Rearrange the audio files in a way that this total number is never exceeded by putting them in different subdirectories, using different levels.

- I also converted originally all audio file names to ascii compatible names but this seems not to be necessary.

- But I'm not sure if very long file names are fully supported. It seems that this also gives a processing error. This can also happen in combination with different subdirectories levels. So I keep the naming of the first split in subdirectories very short (A, B, ...)

In this way I could make working playlists with more than 30000 audio files on the storage device.

If anybody else knows more specific details, please let this know.