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VLC For Android Not Reading Music Playlist

supradude

Newbie
May 19, 2013
12
1
Anyone else having a problem with VLC not showing the songs in their playlists? The player will actually show the name of the playlist, but no songs are listed within. The playlist is stored as a .wpl file. I also converted it to .m3u but to no avail. Any help would be appreciated.
 
Where are the music files themselves located? A playlist file isn't an audio file itself, it's basically just a small text file that contains a listing of the audio file names and which directory or directories they're located in. If you're trying to use a playlist file on your phone but the audio files are actually still located on your Windows PC (assuming this as wpl is a Windows Media Player playlist file), than it's not going to work.
Also, how did you convert that wpl file to a m3u file? I you just renamed the file type extension that could also be part of the problem. Or did you use some kind of utility to actually convert the file?
 
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The files are located on my microsd card in a "music" folder. All music is sorted in a folder for each artist and subfolders for each album. The playlists are also in a folder within the "music" folder as well. The playlists themselves were originally created using WMP, hence the .wpl file extension.

As far as the .wpl to .m3u, I actually used a utility converter as apposed to just renaming.
 
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Using a playlist file on your Android device that was generated by Windows Media Player on a Windows PC might be problem. Again, a playlist is just a text file containing file names and the folders they're residing in. If you open yours up with a text editor you'll get a better idea of the situation.
Try installing a playlist making app from the Play Store and use that to make a playlist. This will result in a playlist file that will contain information based on the actual location of your audio files, not the previous location (... and following the Android file system structure, not a WMP interpretation). When VLC could not find any of the music files it's because their location was incorrect in the playlist file itself.
 
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That all makes sense. But that being the case, how come Samsung Music can read the playlist? ......
Good question, that has me puzzled too. In the Settings menu of your VLC app, there's a 'Media library folders' option that allows you to set specific folders to be included in its 'Directory' window. If the folder where you've stored all your music on your card isn't in the list, try adding it and see if that makes a difference. Perhaps the Samsung Music app by default scans for everything, and then just matches file names to whatever is listed in the playlist file irregardless of the location.
 
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Okay, I got something to work after the same problem:

I edited the .m3u files (by hand, as it were) and made sure that all the paths were:
1. relative, so if the playlist was in /emulated/whatever/Music/Folk/, it listed music like "Random Folk/Song1.mp3"
2. What made it work: I replaced all \ with /. Windows uses backslashes, but VLC on android was NOT happy with them.

Once I did that and refreshed my playlists (pull down from the playlists list), they worked!

hope that helps,

--Peter
 
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