[Essjay]

Hi all, I seem to remember a while ago that we had a discussion in a thread about transferring music to the SD card to use as media in the infotainment system.
Playlists were mentioned, but adding them can be a bit daunting if you don't feel that confident around a PC keyboard.
I thought I would try and write a fairly easy to follow explanation as to how I did this.
I will add at this point that I use iTunes on my PC, but if you don't, the method will be quite similar.
Now I don't profess to be an expert on the PC, far from it, and others may use a different method, but this worked for me, so here goes.

OK so this is what I did to get all my music on the SD card with all my playlists.

My music on my PC is all stored in a folder called D:\Music\iTunes Media\Music.
I basically copied all the contents of this folder to the root of the SD card. So the SD card basically then contains folders for each artist that in turn contain folders for each album and so on.

Then in iTunes, I went to my playlists and export them out as individual .M3U files
File > Library > Export Playlist.
If you then open the files in a text editor like Notepad, you will see that it is essentially just paths to each music file in the playlist.

You then need to edit the path to remove the start of it so that the files can be found on the SD card.
For example:
D:\Music\iTunes Media\Music\Dire Straits\On Every Street\Calling Elvis.m4a
This needs to be:
Dire Straits\On Every Street\Calling Elvis.m4a

To save having to do each line manually I do an edit\search and replace ("D:\Music\iTunes Media\Music\ ). Leave the "Replace with" field blank.

The beauty is that this text is common to all of the .M3U files, so you can copy it to the clipboard using "Ctrl C" and paste it into the "Search and Replace" field with "Ctrl V". This saves a great deal of time.

Then save the playlist files and copy them to the root of the SD card.

Works a treat

Hopefully you'll find it works OK for you too

Steve

 

[stumpy]

Thanks Essjay...I was one having a problem (it's an age thing :lol: ) but one of my daughters friends visited and within minutes downloaded my music from my mp3 via my laptop (not saving it in the laptop) straight onto my SD card. So Simple & quick, was I .... :lol: :roll: No :lol: But thanks for the info mate

 

[AdW]

thanks Steve for this....going to be using this very soon! Your efforts in putting this down on paper are much appreciated, AW

 

[rockman2]

Any idea if this works on a Mac. The paths will be a bit different. What about album art ?

 

[Essjay]

Any idea if this works on a Mac. The paths will be a bit different. What about album art ?

I'm not familiar with using a Mac unfortunately, but, as you say, the paths will be different, however I would assume the directory structure would be similar using iTunes playlists.

With regard to Album art, I used Google to search for the album covers, and save them as jpeg's, then I used a program called 'mp3Tag' on the PC to attach the album cover jpegs to the tracks/albums. Unfortunately mp3Tag is only available for Windows, however I believe there are similar programs available for Mac.

Steve

EDIT: Just done a bit more research on this, and apparently if you use a 'wrapper' such as Wine on the Mac creating a virtual Windows platform, then mp3Tag can be used.

 

[rockman2]

Thanks for the info steve. Probably easier for me just to connect my old iPod Touch via a USB cable and leave it permanantly connected. That would give me my playlist, album art and keep it charged up.

 

[rcharisse]

For anyone that comes across this page but has a mac, or other Unix based system, here's a couple of tips to make playlists work. It took me quite a while to work out the solution, which in the end was quite simple but I thought I'd post on this forum in the hope it'll save somebody else the hassle I had to go through. All you need to do is follow the above instructions (ie exporting as m3u from iTunes and making sure the relative file paths are correct), then you need to change all forward slashes (/) to backslashes (\) as it looks as though the VW system is windows based. The final thing you need to do, and this is what took me a while to work out, is ensure that you save the m3u file in Windows format. It has different line endings and my VW couldn't read the file until I'd done that.

For those that don't know how to save the file in Windows format, this is how I did it: Download and install TextWrangler (

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/textwrangler/id404010395

), open your exported m3u file, then replace all the slashes as mentioned above. Finally, at the bottom of the window, roughly in the middle, you should see a dropdown with the text 'Classic Mac (CR)'; change this to 'Windows (CRLF)', save the file and your VW system should now be able to read it.