Here is some info about how I am approaching the question I asked in the subject title. How do you remove the drive letters and sub-folders that point to your music files, that reside on or in your home personal computing system, but then want to sync with your mobile devices.
I entered this response elsewhere on the internet today. The idea was not mine. I found and sometimes site don't like advertising people away to other sites, so I'll just say it wasn't my own crafting, except a little.
Using an Excel code fragment, you can copy the contents of your .m3u file to a column in Excel. In the next adjacent Excel column, copy the code that is listed below and the results indicated will be provided.
Here are my examples of before and after, and the slightly modified excel code, from that article, I used.
My desktop media center software created the an .m3u playlist. The contents of the playlist is a simple ansi text editable dataset. It is shown immediately below. Note, that it includes all the desktop PC drives and sub-folders. Some of the software players I tested for my mobile devices could not handle that below file structure. That's the point of the above Excel code. I will remove the drives and sub-folders info.
J:\NTFS_1\MP3_D\Dan Fogelberg - River of Souls - 08 - A Love Like This.mp3
J:\NTFS_1\MP3_H\Harry Chapin - Verities & Balderdash - 04 - 30,000 Pounds Of Bananas.mp3
J:\NTFS_1\MP3_H\Harry Chapin - Story of a Life, disc 2 - 04 - 30,000 Pounds of Bananas (live).mp3
Here below, is the output of my slightly modified version of the Excel code, that I found in an article:
\Dan Fogelberg - River of Souls - 08 - A Love Like This.mp3
\Harry Chapin - Verities & Balderdash - 04 - 30,000 Pounds Of Bananas.mp3
\Harry Chapin - Story of a Life, disc 2 - 04 - 30,000 Pounds of Bananas (live).mp3
In the case above, for my needs, even the default \Music\ folder was removed. Now, with the file structure above all 4 mobile software players I have tested work.
For my case, the Excel code looks like:
original code: =CONCATENATE("..\My Music\",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\",REPT(" ",LEN(A1))),LEN(A1))))
my code version: =CONCATENATE("\",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A3,"\",REPT(" ",LEN(A3))),LEN(A3))))
Of course, on the back end, you still need to copy the second Excel column and paste it into a plain text editor, to save your results. Then, you need to rename the text file from" .txt to: .m3u.