How to import m3u playlist (or other playlist)

I used this today and it mostly worked. I had a complicated set of steps to get a roughly working playlist in Volumio. Prior to running these steps I had all my music on a micro-SD card plugged into a USB adapter that was plugged into one of the USB ports on my device. All the songs played fine when accessing them through the Volumio UI from my iMac.

  1. Export my two playlists in Audirvana on my Mac desktop - these are not in #EXTM3U format

  2. Import each playlist into VLC and export it in #EXTM3U format (VLC ‘lost’ some songs at this point as it showed fewer songs than I have in Audirvana with the same playlists

  3. Run PLtoVolumio for each playlist. I had to substitute the directory leading up to my music directory with the path on the USB drive (something like /mnt/USB/xxxxx…/MyMusic). It complained about literal double quotes in three of the songs for one playlist (" characters). I had to substitute these characters to get a playlist in Volumio format created

  4. Those steps were done on my iMac

  5. I then transferred both playlists on my Volumio device (RPi 4B) using scp from iMac to device into /data/playlist, then SSH’d onto the device to check that they were there

  6. Launch the Volumio UI but the playlists wouldn’t play

  7. It looked like an issue with %20 characters so I used sed to replace %20 with a literal space character in both playlist files

  8. Now both playlists played to some extent on my device!

HOWEVER - I seem to have lost some songs along the way when using the above process. As I play songs from the playlists further and further down, it is playing the wrong song (by a few songs apart).

Anyway, I’m glad I’ve got most of the contents of my two playlists across. It’s not a perfect solution as there’s no album art and some songs are missing. However, it’s a lot better than having no playlist import capability.