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[Matt]

My wife's car has a USB port for playing music.

However, I don't think it supports playlists in any way.  You just play a folder, shuffle a folder, or shuffle everything.

So the only way to do playlists is to create a folder for the playlist and put all the songs in the playlist inside that folder.  This wastes some space if a song is in multiple playlists, but I don't really care about this since a 32GB stick for $20 holds so much music.

However, I can't figure out any way to sync this way with Media Center.  We won't put a file on a device multiple times and we also can't use the playlist name when building the file path.

Would making a way to better work with a device that can't do playlists help anyone else?  Or is there some clever way I could get it working now?

Thanks for any help.

[jmone]

I'm a bit surprised it will not do M3U playlists.  What make/model is the head unit?

[MrC]

Several people have asked about a solution to this problem.  They want:

   - the ability to have the playlist name available as a field for file or folder naming purposes
   - the ability to have access to the sequence number during the conversion for file naming purposes
   - a more generalized and more flexible folder naming ability (replacing the current up to 2 levels deep option)

I've suggested two-stage workarounds in the past.  It would be nice if the Sequence concept was generalized so that it could be used throughout MC, from CD burning (simplifying the more cumbersome UI today) to HH syncing and renaming (replacing CustomData(#) with a simple [Sequence] name.

Some threads of interest:
   http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=69513.0
   http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78893.0

[rjm]

Several people have asked about a solution to this problem.  They want:

   - the ability to have the playlist name available as a field for file or folder naming purposes
   - the ability to have access to the sequence number during the conversion for file naming purposes
   - a more generalized and more flexible folder naming ability (replacing the current up to 2 levels deep option)

All good suggestions. In addition:
- make it possible to edit the Playlist field like any other list field
- display the full Playlist path rather than just its final leaf

[Matt]

We came up with a work-around:

You can create multiple virtual devices in MC.

Each virtual device syncs to a single folder (a Play Doctor playlist in my case).

It's not pretty, but it will work.


I'm thinking about how we might support this more elegantly without the need to revert to work-arounds.  It's tricky because the handheld engine has always dealt with devices that support playlists.

The head unit in question is the stock unit in a new Honda Accord.  I think it might be made by Alpine, although I'm not sure.  This is a common car ( and one of the few family sedans you can get with a manual ) but I really don't know if other cars and devices have the same limitation.  In other words, I'm not sure how many people it would help doing work here.

[Matt]

The one problem with the workaround is that you don't get tracks played in playlist order.

In the case of a Play Doctor mix, it's smarter about order than a shuffle on the device will be since Play Doctor is careful not to play things that are too similar back-to-back.

So MrC's request to use the sequence in the filename would be useful.

It also doesn't let you put the same song in a playlist multiple times without this, so my 1000 song mix turned into a 568 song less good mix.

[john_kane]

I found this thread after searching the forum for a solution to similar issues.   I would like to transition to MediaCenter for syncing my devices and replace my current solution. I think its worth resurrecting and I think some feature development would be helpful to more people.

Matt,

I have found (in general) that most car stereos (especially factory units, but a fair amount of aftermarket head units as well) do not support playlists (at all).  In addition, I have found that the head units' ability to handle/play/manage audio stored on removable media (USB, microSD etc) to be very limiting.  In general, the implementations  seem to not want to deal with the file/folder and absolute/relative paths of playlists and audio organization.  As an example, some units will only let you 'randomize' across a single folder on a USB stick. If you have the standard \album\artist\track system than this means you can only randomize across an album.  Other head units have  very very poor randomization or none at all.  My wife's car resets its randomization to the same spot each time you start the car (seed = 0). So the 'random' list is actually a deterministic list that repeats itself.
The only real way to work around these issues is with a playlist based folder system. So if I have three playlists (playlista, playlistb, playlistc), the folder scheme on the usb storage is:

\basedir\playlista\(track1..n).mp3
\basedir\playlistb\(track1..n).mp3

etc...

I am currently solving this problem with a very long and complicated perl script that performs device syncing for me. (And the script is currently tied to iTunes using its COM interface, since there are some iPods in the household.) And for each device, I can specify whether to sync by standard \album\artist\track or by \playlist\track.  I then create a master playlist with all tracks on it (and now I can simulate random playback across all files), and separate playlists for any other mixes.  This will mean that multiple copies of the same song are present on the usb, reducing space, but it gets around the major deficiencies of the various head units and devices.

 As maintenance and management of the script has gotten to be unruly, I'd really like to transition to MediaCenter for device management.  I was happy to see that many of the features I have in my script are already in MediaCenter (like selecting which audio formats the device can support, and automatically transcoding if needed). 

Being able to sync the device by playlist folder is the one major missing piece.  Having a database term like [Playlist] or [SmartList] would allow setting up the audio folder paths on the usb device to match.

Maybe this is something to consider for MC19    ?

[Louis]

Another problem I've found with syncing to a USB device is that Unicode characters are not supported in the Playlist, which limits its usefulness even if the head unit did support playlists

[stiv32]

MrC has written a script that will help you. It extracts selected files into a base folder of your choice alongside with a playlist. You won't need the playlist but you can surely use the all the rest. This also solves the problems with Unicode characters.

You can find it here

   http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=85990.msg611361#msg611361