Can anyone help me find the correct format for importing *.m3u playlists into my A8. I have tried several variations (with absolute and relative paths) but I keep on getting a 'Parse error.' In an attempt to be clever I exported a test playlist I had created on the A8 in the hope I could see the format and emulate it. Unfortunately the exported file is in an unreadable *.evpls format and not very helpful.
Place the relative path m3u file inside the EverSoloMusic folder. The m3u format can be either original or extended. Original format sample: Demo Tracks.m3u (artist/album/track.flac) Chopin/GUITARS1/01 - Nocturne Op.9 No.2.flac I Musici/Evergreens for Strings/10-Haydn; Andante Cantabile (from; String Quartet in F 'Serenade').flac Jordi Savall/The Celtic Viol I/09-Hard is my fate.flac The Purcell Quartet/Corelli La Folia/10 - 1713) - Sonata da camera in A major Op4 No3 - Preludio; Largo.flac Gary Peacock And Bill Frisell/Just So Happens/05 - Home On The Range, No. 2.flac Karel Boehlee Trio/Silent Nocturne/03-Orange City.flac Mahavishnu Orchestra/Birds of Fire/01 - Thousand Island Park(2496).flac Dave Brubeck Quartet/Time Out/03 - Take Five.flac Bach/Sonates pour viole de gambe/12-Sonate en la majeur - Larghetto.flac Bach/Sonates pour viole de gambe/08-Sonate I BWV 1027 en sol majeur - Adagio.flac Reference Recordings/Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra/17-Suite From Tafelmusik, Book III.flac
Hi Kyama, Thank you for responding to my request for assistance. I tried your suggestion with a playlist Test 4.m3u shown below selected from my music library on the SSD.. I uploaded the file to my Music Library folder on the SSD and tried importing it. I got 'Error Parsing File' I also tried uploading the same test file to the EverSoloMusic folders in both my SSD (FFF-DDM66) and Storage. I got the same 'Error Parsing File'. What does this error mean and what am I doing wrong here? Andy Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/03 Moonlight In Vermont.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/04 Music, Music, Music.m4a""" Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/05 No Greater Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/06 Poinciana.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/07 Wood'yn You.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/08 What's New.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/01 But Not For Me.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/02 Surrey With The Fringe On The Top.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/01 The Awakening.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/02 I Love Music.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/03 Patterns.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/04 Dolphin Dance.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/05 You're My Everything.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/06 Stolen Moments.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/07 Wave.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/01 Ahmad's Blues.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/02 It Could Happen to You.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/03 I Wish I Knew.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/04 Autumn Leaves.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/05 Stompin' at the Savoy.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/06 Cheek to Cheek.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/07 The Girl Next Door.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/08 Secret Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/09 Squatty Roo.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/10 Taboo.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/11 Autumn in New York.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/12 A Gal in Calico.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/13 That's All.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/14 Should I_.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/15 Seleritus.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad's Blues/16 Let's Fall in Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/01 Back To the Future.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/02 I'll Always Be With You.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/03 Saturday Morning.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/04 Edith's Cake.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/05 The Line.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/06 I'm In the Mood for Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/07 Firefly.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/08 Silver.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/09 I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/10 One (Ahad).m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/11 Saturday Morning (Reprise).m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/12 Gyroscope.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/13 Arabesque.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/14 I Love You.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/15 Without a Song.m4a
I see something weird, like the four double-quotes on line 2, or the single-quote/apostrophe on line 5... all things that are source of trouble for a string-parser... try removing them, in the end the file name has no importance... I replace all punctuation in my files by the underscore _, so that Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/07 Wood'yn You.m4a would become Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/07 Wood_yn You.m4a
Could you create some FLAC format sound sources and m3u files and test it? It may be that m4a is simply an unsupported format. I'm using a DMP-A6, so I can't confirm if the A8 has m4a support.
Nutul, I have removed all the quotation marks from the test file and replaced them with underscores. For good measure, I also removed the parenthesis. The sanitized version is shown below. Unfortunately, the parsing error persists. Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/03 Moonlight In Vermont.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/04 Music, Music, Music.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/05 No Greater Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/06 Poinciana.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/07 Wood_yn You.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/08 What_s New.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/01 But Not For Me.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/At The Pershing_ But Not for Me/02 Surrey With The Fringe On The Top.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/01 The Awakening.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/02 I Love Music.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/03 Patterns.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/04 Dolphin Dance.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/05 You_re My Everything.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/06 Stolen Moments.m4a Ahmad Jamal Trio/The Awakening/07 Wave.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/01 Ahmad_s Blues.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/02 It Could Happen to You.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/03 I Wish I Knew.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/04 Autumn Leaves.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/05 Stompin_ at the Savoy.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/06 Cheek to Cheek.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/07 The Girl Next Door.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/08 Secret Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/09 Squatty Roo.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/10 Taboo.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/11 Autumn in New York.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/12 A Gal in Calico.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/13 That_s All.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/14 Should I_.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/15 Seleritus.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Ahmad_s Blues/16 Let_s Fall in Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/01 Back To the Future.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/02 I_ll Always Be With You.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/03 Saturday Morning.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/04 Edith_s Cake.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/05 The Line.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/06 I_m In the Mood for Love.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/07 Firefly.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/08 Silver.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/09 I Got It Bad and That Ain_t Good.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/10 One.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/11 Saturday Morning_Reprise.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/12 Gyroscope.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/13 Arabesque.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/14 I Love You.m4a Ahmad Jamal/Saturday Morning/15 Without a Song.m4a
One last try: remove the commas also... BTW, it's not enough to remove such offending characters from the playlist file... the relevant files MUST be renamed accordingly too! The parsing error is too generic... although I don't believe the parser is expecting all the files to exist to validate the playlist... this cannot be ruled out 100%... Also, the playlist happens to use relative paths... what about trying a copy of it with absolute ones? Just trying to help you out here, no offense.
I am starting to wonder about whether I this is going to be more work than rebuilding the playlists using the A8? When I get into my classical collection many of the songs titles and composers have accented characters in their names eg. Fauré, Dvořák, for example. I don't think I want to have to go into my library of 21,000 tracks and remove all these. I am disappointed, I purchased the A8 to get away from similar issues with Playlists under the BluOS platform. Surely there must be a better importing solution?
I share Backpacker's frustrations over the playlist import mess. I have a D6 Master and have the same issue. Tried many different things in the m3u and like Backpacker, nothing works. Why can't somebody at Zidoo be clear as to what exactly the format needs to be and what's supported or not. (absolute and relative paths, or anything else) If this functionality is not 100% yet, please let us know too. We understand. But please don't let us continue wasting our time needlessly. PLEASE!!
Hi, It is recommended to add music from a specific folder only, supporting the following M3U format: 01 - The Moment I Knew.flac 02 - Come Back… Be Here.flac 03 - Girl at Home.flac 04 - State of Grace (acoustic version).flac 05 - Ronan.flac 06 - Better Man (from The Vault).flac 07 - Nothing New (from The Vault).flac 08 - Babe (from The Vault).flac 09 - Message in a Bottle (from The Vault).flac 10 - I Bet You Think About Me (from The Vault).flac 11 - Forever Winter (from The Vault).flac 12 - Run (from The Vault).flac 13 - The Very First Night (from The Vault).flac 14 - All Too Well (10 minute version) (from The Vault).flac
Hi Ericg, I have some good news for you. Through a long process of 'trial and error' I did manage to get my A8 to import all of my Apple Music Playlists (87 of them some with over 900 songs). I will try to describe the steps I took to achieve this. First some details of my setup. My Apple Music library is stored on a Synology NAS (2x4TB drive) and my Apple Music software is running on a MacBookPro. I point the A8 at the folder called 'music' on this network drive and it builds the music library (25,000 songs, 595 GB, mostly Apple Lossless format with some Hi-Res) without any difficulty. This turned out to be a much better option for accessing and updating the music library than my initial plan which was to store the music library on the 2TB SSD drive I had installed in the A8 I exported all my Apple Music playlists to a separate dedicated folder on the Synology Drive in native *.m3u format. I encountered two problems when I tried to import my playlists to the Eversolo A8. First. The parsing algorithm that reads the playlist files does not like any characters with accents. Thus followed a long and laborious process of removing all accented character from song names, artist names, album names, composer names etc for my whole music library. No more Sant-Saëns, Dvořák, Jacqueline du Pré, Pathétique, Má Vlast etc. A large chunk of my library is classical so there were lots of accented characters to get rid of. A very tedious process! I found could save some time by using Apple Music to search for a particular character across my whole library. Second. For some strange reason that I still don't understand, I would often find errors in the m3u files that needed correcting. In order to correct these I found the best way is to left click on the playlist name and 'Duplicate' the file. Then edit the name of the copied file and remove the extension .m3u. You can then left click on the copied file name and go to 'Open With' and select 'TextEdit'. This retains all the original text formatting so you can see if there are any unusual characters in the file. In my case the two things I had to remove were open quotation marks (") which sometimes appeared in front of a file address, and an incorrect library address (music-1). For some unknown reason Apple Music would change some of the music file addresses from 'music' to 'music-1' The 'Find' and Replace' function (COMMAND+OPTION+F) in TextEdit is really useful for removing these errors. Finally once you have saved your corrected file in TextEdit, simply delete the original '.m3u' file and rename the 'copy' with the '.m3u' extension. In my experience these corrected *.m3u playlist files can be imported into the A8 using the 'Import eversolo playlist(File)' command without any problems. Hope this fix works for you too. Merry Christmas. Andy
Thank you Eki and Backpacker for sharing the information. Much appreciated. I also store my music library on a network drive. Approximately 10000 mostly FLAC HiRes files. Listen through a Volumio Primo, which I have kept until I can transfer the playlists to the DMP A6. I spent months creating numerous playlists by hand and don't want to have to do it again. Backpacker, could you please share an excerpt of an m3u file that worked for you? Thank you!
Hi Ericg, I have attached a copy of the first of my Playlists that I imported. There are 133 tracks by one of my favourite Jazz pianists. Note that this is a duplicate of the *m3u file. I had to remove the *.m3u extension and add the *.txt extension before I could upload it. Hope you find it useful, let me know if you have any there requests. Andy
Lessons learned while working with playlists Relative paths to network locations DO work. In case of Windows, the path needs to contain the name of the mountpoint as it appears in the File Explorer under "Network". In my case, the mountpoint for my music shows as "EGMEDIA" under "Network" in the File Explorer. So the relative path to my files would start with "/EGMEDIA". For example: /EGMEDIA/HiRes/Bryan Adams/So Far So Good/01 Summer of ’69.flac It is curious that if you do a "File Path" on the same file in the Library, the system shows: smb://10.0.0.1/HiRes/Bryan Adams/So Far So Good/01 Summer of ’69.flac 10.0.0.1 is my media server. ...but the system does not recognize that same path when used in the m3u file. I placed the m3u files in a directory under /EGMEDIA/HiRes and navigated to that directory when uploading the m3u from the interface. I recommend uploading m3u files using the device's screen instead of the App. You get some information when there is an issue during the upload when using the device's screen, versus nothing when using the app. System recognizes either "/" or "\" in the file path. Square brackets don't seem to be interpreted when present in the path specified in the m3u file. Importing of the m3u file does not fail, but any song which path contains square brackets is not included in the playlist created. For example, the path \EGMEDIA\HiRes\Yes-HR\90125 [192kHz · 24bit]\01 - Owner Of A Lonely Heart.flac would not work. HDTracks has for some time been including the sample and bit rates in square brackets as part of the name of the album. This is an unforseen issue. It is also curious that if you do a "File Path" on the same file in the Library, the system shows the square brackes as they appear in the m3u file. Also, if you manually add from the library one of those songs whose file has square brackets, to the same playlist created using the m3u file, it is added no problem. And if you do a "File Path" on that manually added file, it shows the square brackets. Go figure! I don't know how many other characters are not being recognized. I don't seem to be having issues with accented characters. The following worked fine for me: /EGMEDIA/HiRes/Celia Cruz/The Best/07 Usted Abusó.flac Could Zidoo advice as if this unrecognized character issue when importing m3u is something that can be addressed? This will save us time by either waiting for a fix or going ahead with a different manual approach. The problem is that one does not know what did not make it from the m3u to the corresponding playlist. In my case, I already know that at I will be missing many songs purchased from HDTracks. Thanks, Eric
Hello, I've been importing playlists from another system using the m3u import functionality. Although there are many issues with this functionality, it is better than having to build the playlists manually. Thank you! As Backpacker described above, there are issues with character recognition when importing m3u files. The only way I know to find what songs DID NOT make it through an import, is to go into the newly created playlist and visually comprare with the original playlist. Unfortunatelly, when going into the newly created playlist, there seems to be a limit on the number of songs displayed; around 50 or so. So there is no way of knowing what songs were not uploaded; most likley because of character recognition issues. Could it please be possible to remove this limit on the number of songs in a playlist that are displayed? Thank you, Eric