m3u and m3u8 files not loading

2025-02-18 10:25:01

I save playlists to m3u8 files when I want to transfer a playlist from one PC to another. The text file lets me run a search and replace on drive and folder in notepad++ to match the file locations on the target PC. However I can't get the Foobar2000 for Mac to even load a m3u8 or m3u properly that I just created in it from one of the existing playlists. A saved fpl will reload display and play tracks properly. But it's choking on the other 2 types:

Re: m3u and m3u8 files not loading

Reply #1 – 2025-02-20 16:04:33

Hello. Try replacing all the backslashes \ with / forward slashes.
I've also recently started playing around with Foobar2000 on mac, and had the same issue.
I'm still rather new to mac so I was surprised to learn that apparently it doesn't understand backslashes for file paths.
Even in terminal when I use \ instead of / (like I'm used to in windows) it says no such file or directory.
Inversely, windows players seem to have no problems with navigating / in m3u playlists, although from my tests, Winamp and Aimp fail to "open file location" in explorer when dealing with / paths.

Also, I wonder, are those playlists you're saving reference music files across different disk volumes, or are the playlists themselves saved in folders parallel to music? cuz unless so, it shouldn't be saving absolute paths including disk: letter, only subfolder structure.
Even then, other players (Aimp and older Winamp 5.666, which I used a lot until recently) are able to save relative paths even going up folders all the way to root of the disk as long as files are on the same disk, avoiding mentioning the drive letter. They do so by adding ..\..\ or \ before path. It's very convenient if it's on a flash drive that gets assigned different letters across PC's.
Frankly I wish Foobar supported such relative paths too (not just subfolders).

Re: m3u and m3u8 files not loading

Reply #2 – 2025-02-23 03:23:57

The problem I'm having with playlists exported to m3u8 files in FB2K4Mac seems to be because my library is on a connected 256GB USB flash drive. I'm not seeing the problem with library tracks that live on the Mac's internal drive's /Music folder. After copying over a few test files there, it's writing this path to exported playlists that do reload properly:

/Users/<current-user>/Music/<various albums>/<various-tracks>

What wasn't working was creating playlists from files on the flash drive. Tracks in those are listed like this, and for some reason fail to reload properly.

mac-volume://547852EA-457E-4789-547D-E83BAFDB285C9/MP3s/<various albums>/<various-tracks>

On Windows systems, FB2K has always saved the full path to tracks right back to the letter of the drive their on when it writes m3u8 playlists. So I get entries that look like this:

D:\MP3s\<various albums>\<various-tracks>

There does seem to be conflicts between the Mac OS file system & character set FB2K4Mac is using and the WIndows OS & ACSII & Unicode character sets for playlist files there. I did see that problem with the forward and backward slash characters. But I had a bigger problem with Windows not being able to read about 10-15% of the entries in the m3u8 files made on the Mac after running a search & replace for location. I'm not quite sure what happened there.

I'm a neophyte at pretty much everything Apple myself rusty82. There was a pretty tough learning curve there for a while.