Getting MMI to recognise Playlists on an SD Card

[Bash D Bishop]

Apologies for the formatting but the board seems to change it at will once I click save.

If this has been covered before please accept my apologies but I did a lot of searching an never found a definitive answer to my problem. What I am doing here is giving insight in to my problem and how I overcame it in the hope it helps someone else.

Not having AMI in my car I am reliant on either CDs or the SD card for my music. While I was able to copy my music over and play it successfully, I could not fathom how to get playlists from, in my case, iTunes to the Audi SD MMI. Exporting them directly to the SD didn’t work as while they appeared on the display they would either do nothing when selected or open up and cycle through all the tracks displaying a message saying “track XXX damaged” or something like that.

I could have given up and just selected tracks at random or completely reorganised my file structure in to pseudo playlist but the issue with this is that it would play the tracks in name order rather than playlist order. However, after much perseverance and reading of others experiences I finally found an end to end method that works for me. So here it is:-

1) I let iTunes sort my library and I have all my music files in one location. - C:\Users\Bash_D_Bishop\Documents\Dropbox\Music\iTu nes\iTunes Media\Music\

2) Below this the files are then broadly sorted by Artist or in some cases “Compilations” or “Various Artists”. The latter two categories are irrelevant in their own right but I’m highlighting as your directory may be different.

3) Using Windows Explorer I navigated to the Music folder at the end of the path - C:\Users\Bash_D_Bishop\Documents\Dropbox\Music\iTu nes\iTunes Media\Music\ - and then selected all the folders inside that by pressing CTRL and A simultaneously. As I already had another explorer window open for the blank SD Card I simply dragged the selected files over to the SD Card window and let windows copy the files over. My 17 GB of files took about 20 minutes.

I will now digress in to what went wrong before I continue with the solution.

My first thought was all I had to do now was export my Playlists from iTunes in to the Root of the SD card and everything would be fine. So that is what I did – “Export”, “Save As”, location the SD Card (this was drive H on my PC) file type .m3u - and took the card out to the car. After selecting “Media” I could see the Playlists in MMI but when I selected one it gave the errors I highlighted earlier. I then took the SD card out the car and put it back in to the PC.

Using Windows Explorer again I right-clicked one of the playlists and then selected “Open with” and on the next menu “Notepad”. If you haven’t opened a playlist file with Notepad before you may have to use a more convoluted process such as opening Notepad itself and then using “Open” (All file types) to open a playlist file. Once you have done this once it should then give you the option to do it from a right-click. You can use any text editor as M3U files are just glorified text files.

When the file was opened in Notepad this is what I saw:-

#EXTINF:206,The Eton Rifles - The Jam
C:\Users\Bash_D_Bishop\Documents\Dropbox\Music\iTu nes\iTunes Media\Music\Compilations\The Sound Of The Suburbs\01 The Eton Rifles.m4a

It then clicked with me as to why it wasn’t working. MMI was being told the file it was being asked to play was in - C:\Users\Bash_D_Bishop\Documents\Dropbox\Music\iTu nes\iTunes Media\Music\Compilations\The Sound Of The Suburbs\ - But obviously it had no idea where this was, hence the errors.

To get around the problem I thought it was a simple case of stripping out the spurious info, saving the file and all would be fine. So I did and was left with this:-

#EXTINF:206,The Eton Rifles - The Jam
\Compilations\The Sound Of The Suburbs\01 The Eton Rifles.m4a

In theory this should work as MMI would now look for the music file in the folders starting in the root directory. I saved the files and took the card out to the car and tried again. But it didn’t work.

I was now completely stumped. There was no reason why it should not work as all the paths were correct but MMI still would not play ball. I was resigned to never getting it working when I had one last thought – “what if in the process of resaving the M3U file from Notepad that it was somehow corrupting the properties and therefore MMI wasn’t seeing it as a playlist file.
I don’t have a playlist builder other than iTunes so I downloaded Playlist Creator 3.6.2 from Oddgravity - http://www.oddgravity.de/download.php?id=100 – this is Freeware and there is no license or cost.

So continuing on from 3) above this is how I got it working:-

4) I selected each playlist I had individually in iTunes and used the Export function to copy the files as M3U to the root of the SD card. This is relatively straightforward to do.

5) Using Windows Explorer I can see the playlist files in the root of the SD card. They won’t work for the reasons I’ve explained above.

6) Using Notepad I opened the first playlist file. As expected each song had the - C:\Users\Bash_D_Bishop\Documents\Dropbox\Music\iTu nes\iTunes Media\Music\ - path that caused the problems.

Selecting “Edit” from the menu bar I then selected “Replace”. Next I highlighted the spurious text - C:\Users\Bash_D_Bishop\Documents\Dropbox\Music - copied it and pasted it in to the “Find What” field. I didn’t want to replace it with anything so I left it blank. I then clicked “Replace All” and it did what I wanted it to do. So I now had a file like I described above –

#EXTINF:206,The Eton Rifles - The Jam
\Compilations\The Sound Of The Suburbs\01 The Eton Rifles.m4a

I then saved the file and exited Notepad.

7) Opening up Playlist Creator I then clicked “Open” and navigated to the SD Card (Drive H) and selected the playlist I wanted and it loaded it up. In the detail window under folder I could now see each track showing- H:\Compilations\The Sound Of The Suburbs\01 The Eton Rifles.m4a

8) Next I went to “Settings” and then from the left-hand menu “Playlist Details”. On the window that opens go to the dropdown menu under “Saving playlist entries” and select “Absolute, without drive .....” then click okay and you will be back at the main menu.

9) On the bottom part of the window under “Playlist Creation” make sure the Save Location is the root of the SD card (in my case this is H:\) if it isn’t right use the browse button on the right to navigate to it.

10) Under “Name and Type” you could choose the same name as the iTunes export and choose to overwrite but I simply used the same name and added V2 at the end. Select .m3u from the dropdown although .pls seems to work as well. Finally click “Create Playlist” and let Playlist Creator do its stuff.

11) Finally take the card out to the car, put it in the slot, let MMI load and then select the playlist you created in 9) above. If you have followed these steps then you should have a working playlist.

One day I’ll get round to doing screenshots if people think it would add a bit more but for the time being hopefully this will be useful.

[Mrplasma]

Nice :-)

[Guest 2]

Excellent write up and I'm sure it will help a lot of people out!

Will sticky in the morning.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Wuffles]

Erm, sorry to be a wet blanket (as I am), but if you're putting H:\ in the path of the files, you might fall into a bit of problem later on - unless I've misunderstood. Can you copy and paste the contents of one of your working m3u files please? I'm curious.

Ta.

[Bash D Bishop]

Erm, sorry to be a wet blanket (as I am), but if you're putting H:\ in the path of the files, you might fall into a bit of problem later on - unless I've misunderstood. Can you copy and paste the contents of one of your working m3u files please? I'm curious.

Ta.

Sorry. Typo. A cut and paste error.

Under 6 There was an errant H: It should have said:-

#EXTINF:206,The Eton Rifles - The Jam
\Compilations\The Sound Of The Suburbs\01 The Eton Rifles.m4a

This is the content of one of the working files.

In 7. the H: reference is correct but this only appears in the Playlist Creator window but not when you save the file.

I've corrected the post.

[Wuffles]

Righto

[Bash D Bishop]

This screenshot shows what is in the file. Note there is not drive designator:-

Playlist in Notepad.jpg

This shows the same file as viewed in Playlist Creator. Ignore the fact they are all in Red as the files the play list refers to are not on this SD card.

Playlist Creator.jpg

[belly buster]

Good tunes

[Passatier3]

Not the same problem but it was a bit of a faff getting a number of CD's onto the SD card.

As posted elsewhere I first put them on at 193 kbps and was disappointed at the sound quality. Then, once pointed in the right direction, put one on at 320 kbps and was pleased with the quality. So proceeded with putting 20 albums on, only to find they wouldn't play in the car.

Checking back in the PC found that the format was MP4 - don't know why this had changed from copying the first one? Anyway, after re-copying one album and thinking about the time wasted so far, found that (I-Tunes being used) I could convert them all at one go to MP3 Format. Funnily enough, when adding some further albums they appeared as MP3 straight off!

Anyway, all part of the learning process and the results were worth the effort, as sounds great.

[Duffy3074]

Could you not just create a new folder called playlists and create sub folders within that titled whatever you want a certain playlist to be known as and then copy and past duplicate tracks into that folder in the order you want them?

It'll take up slightly more room on the SD card because of the duplication but should work otherwise should it not?