[Maemo 5] How to transfer/convert playlists for use in Media Player?
 

I need urgent help. Have only two days to sort out my media player as travelling back to UK on Wednesday so if there is a problem with device need to know by then so I can return it before I leave.

I have transferred music and playlists to the device and it plays my music fine but does not play any of my playlists. When I click shuffle or select any song in the playlist it just says unable to play file.

I have tried synching using the N900 as a mass storage device, using PC suite and using Winamp and always the same problem. I thought maybe Nokia Ovi Music would be the solution but whether I connect in PC suite mode or mass storage mode it says your device is not connected in the correct mode for Nokia Music.

Does anyone know what the solution is? If there is no one to correct the media player is there a way to reflash the N900 using a Windows 7 PC or from the device itself.

I quite like the N900 but if there is no way to fix the media player or reflash the device then I would have to return it and move elsewhere.

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

What type of playlist - the media player I believe can handle m3u playlists. not sure about others.

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

Yes my playlists are M3u. I have managed to reflash my device now. But to avoid the issue again what is the best way to synch to the device to be sure the Playlists work? Mass storage? Nokia PC Suite? Music Software Programme?

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

I recall having problems with absolute paths in m3u's a long time ago. I don't know if it's still an issue, but you might want to check with a text editor.

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

Sorry I am a complete noob. What am I to do with the text editor?

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

If the m3u uses absolute paths they will be wrong on your device. For example, if the song is stored on your computer as:

/home/etuoyo/Documents/Music/airguitar.ogg

and on your device as:

/home/user/music/airguitar.ogg

then all the files listed in the m3u will point to the wrong location. You can easily check this by opening the file in a text editor.

I don't really know whether m3u's are supposed to use relative or absolute paths (relative would be ./airguitar.ogg if the m3u is in the same place as the file), but you could at least fix the problem with the following shell command:

sed 's,/home/etuoyo/Documents/Music,/home/user/music,' old.m3u > fixed.m3u

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

hi all, i just picked up my N900 over the weekend (switching from an N82 by the way) and really impressed with it so far - however, i am having the same (or very similar) issue as the OP in this topic and was hoping to get some help from the community here

in the past, I have used WMP11 or MediaMonkey to sync playlists to my N82, which has worked great. When I do the same with my N900, it copies the songs (and file structure) as well as the playlist *files* just fine - but when I try to play a song off the playlist, I get an error that says "Unable to find media file"

i'm thinking it may be something to do with the format of the playlists (m3u generated by MediaMonkey), so I opened up the playlist file in Notepad and doublechecked that the paths were correct. An example line reads as follows:

\Music\Sarah McLachlan\Wintersong\08 - Silent Night.mp3

This seems to match the location of the actual mp3, so I'm a bit stuck at this point. Is there something obvious that I'm missing here? I'll admit that I'm totally new to Linux/Maemo so maybe it's something really simple like having "/" instead of "\", or adding a "." at the beginning of each line?

I also tried creating a playlist from within the Media player to compare and see how they are formatted, but can't seem to find the location where the playlists are saved. I'm guessing it's in a protected folder and perhaps not even a simple text format anyways.

This is really frustrating me as one of the biggest reasons I upgraded to the N900 from the N82 (besides the Web capabilities and T-Mo 3G) was the 32GB built-in memory and hoping to be able to use it as a servicable iPod-like music player.

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

That's an absolute Windows path with an implicit drive letter. If by "match the location" you mean that the graphical file manager by default shows you the parent directory of Music, the real path is /home/user/Music.

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

Ah I see. That could be the problem. How do I run a shell command?

And does anyone know which music software I can use to create my playlists so I don't have this problem in the future?

Re: Corrupted Media Player - Please Help
 

Yes me too. Even sold my 32gb ipod touch because I was getting this device.