How can I make a play list on the PC that will work on my Android phone?

I am ripping a bunch of old audio books and the chapter titles are the same for each CD (track 1, track 2, etc.) and sometimes it doesn't even get the book title and CD number right but renaming each file is a pain (especially because sometimes media player seems to look at the meta data for title so I have to dig around to change it where it needs to be changed)

Making a play list on Android is a huge, huge pain because it doesn't like to show full names, because it is a tiny screen etc.

So is there a format/program that I can use on the PC that will be a valid playlist on Android? I have all the files in the same big folder (with sub folders for each CD) and I would like to just put a playlist at that top folder then take the whole thing to the phone and have it work....

Is that possible?

This is how it's done using MusicBee.

To be clear, they're syncing everything including playlists - but the last post shows how to configure it correctly so that playlists work as expected when they're synced to a phone.

You could try using Foobar to make M3Us, which are an old playlist format. I don't know if your Android software will support that, but most MP3 players do, so it's worth a try.

The way that works generally is that you just play the first track in the book, which fires up Foobar with the one track in its playlist. Then you add the extra tracks so they're all listed, do File/Save Playlist, and be sure to choose M3U format when you save. M3U is a really old format that pretty much every player supports. Foobar also supports M3U8 (which I think adds Unicode), and FPL filetypes. M3U8 might work on your player, but FPLs almost certainly won't. Foobar is too minor a player for people to implement its native playlist format.

If you separate your books by directory (which is how I would do it), you can save in a directory above the one that contains the actual files. Foobar is smart enough to use relative paths for its playlist. Say you're doing BookA, in its own subdirectory. If you save in the parent, then it will construct the playlist as "BookA/TrackA.mp3, BookA/TrackB.mp3", and so on. That might make it easier to add the M3Us without having to mess around with the individual tracks.

Foobar can easily handle this part, I'm very confident in that software. I am less confident that your playback software will support M3Us properly, but most do. Getting it to add ONLY M3Us and not MP3s might be tricky. You might have to do something like stick the playlists off in a directory 'to the side', and add only files from that playlist directory. The relative paths *might* lead your playback software back into the sibling dirs, but that's purely based on your device.

In other words, say it looks like this:


Then you'd either put the playlist in BOOKS if you could add just M3Us, or you might add:


after BookC, and load playlists from there.

Oh, dammit, I just tried doing the side playlist with Foobar, but it's not smart enough to use relative pathnames when I do that. Instead, it does absolute paths, pointing at drive:\subdir\subdir. That almost certainly won't work with your player.

What I'd try first is saving-in-parent and adding only M3Us in the playback software. If you can't do that, and if you're drowning in extra track info, then what I'd personally do is save absolute playlists off to the side, and then use Vim or something similar to edit the absolute paths down into relative ones. Even Notepad might work. M3Us look like plaintext files, to a quick inspection, so a simple global search-and-replace would probably instantly fix a playlist.

M3U playlists are definitely supported. That's also how MusicBee does its sync to Android. You tell it where to put the M3U files on the phone, and where the music should go. Then it will use what it already knows about your PC and where its music/playlists are to translate when it syncs a playlist and its accompanying songs.

Thanks. It seems like i have some playing around to do!