Handling of m3u files

[Julian Wattam]

How does Rocket Player interpret manually created m3u files? I generate mine using the file path from the iTunes XML file, as I no longer use the iTunes app.

The file path on my computer is not always the file path on my phone. It seems like iSyncr (when I was using it originally to get files into the phone) made different decisions to iTunes when it came to illegal characters in metadata. A good example is an album called "Something/Anything?", which iTunes turned into "Something_Anything_", while iSyncr chose "SomethingAnything".

Until about a week ago, my m3u files were working ok. I believe RP focuses on the file name and either ignores the path completely or disregards it when the file doesn't exist there. In a few cases, the interpretation of my m3u file would cause RP to play the wrong song because it found a matching file name elsewhere. But this only happened when the path was wrong - I think if I'd got around to fixing the path in my m3u file I would have solved that problem.

However, about a week ago, RP stopped recognising my m3u files - no playlist arrived in RP after a rescan. Why? After some experimentation I discovered that RP is recognising the files but now wants a full and correct file path on each line - without that, there is no playlist to be created. This is a lengthy path (which is fine), starting with /storage/. Before, a path starting with /[artist]/ appeared to work (although now I'm thinking the path was having no effect).

I'm hoping for some insight from Justin on how/why RP's attitude to my m3u files has suddenly changed (and whether I can change it back, at least temporarily). Then I need to fix all the wrong file paths in my data from the iTunes XML file - which I can do if I understand the rules applied by iTunes and iSyncr. If iTunes always uses _ for special characters and iSyncr just removes special characters, a simple find/replace in my iTunes data could fix it, but I need to do this with some caution as I can't validate the result easily. Maybe a better solution would be to regenerate file paths from metadata to match the iSyncr rules. I suspect iSyncr is more consistent than iTunes because of how iTunes works.

Thanks!