I cannot import m3u playlists

Another update, should now work correctly with "relative to the root of the drive" paths, network paths, absolute paths and "relative to folder the m3u is in".

tt2

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP3 with iTunes version 10.4.0.80 And I too can't import my Winamp playlist into iTunes onto my iPod touch 64GB. The playlist are empty....😕 Please Apple fix this bug ASAP!

I noticed this change when I updated to iTunes 10.4.0.80 also. I discovered it's because iTunes now wants PC users to Mac-ify the file paths in m3u playlists. E.g. \Users\brooke\music\ needs to be C:/Users/brooke/music/

I fixed it by opening my Winamp m3u playlist in Notepad, then doing a replace all for:

\Users to C:/Users

AND

\ to /

Of course, PCs won't recognise these paths, so you'll need to save the resulting playlist as a copy, instead of writing over your normal Winamp playlist.

Not sure why this change was made or was even necessary - I've been importing my m3u playlists for years with few hassles. Guess we have Apple to thank for making our lives more difficult in yet another way!

Yes, 10.4 has totally broken playlist Import here (on Win7). Tried the mac-ify suggestion but it made no difference, I get a blank playlist every time. How we do we revert to an earlier version? this is causing me significant grief. Any other work-arounds?

Did you convert all the filenames, including any on drives other than C? It will probably still be blank until every single filename is Mac-ified. If you've already done this, your next bet is to search for the previous version of iTunes (whatever that was). Someone might have uploaded it to a software indexing site.

Ok, I think I have figured it out the Mac-ified version only works if your music is on the C: hard drive. If you store your music on another hard drive the path in the m3u must look something like this:

file://localhost/<Drive Letter>:/<Path>/<Song Name>

ie. file://localhost/D:/Music/Song.mp3

Hope that helps, it seemed to work for me.

If you Export a playlist it is still saved in the original format, which is understood by many programs. In my case, all my music is on Y:\Artist\Album.. and that's how they appear in the Exported m3u file.

So this bug with Import breaks all possible modes of usefulness!

"file://localhost/" worked. Thanks Mar16. Stranger still is that I can export an M3U playlist from iTunes and then try to import it, and it still won't work without Mar16's workaround. That's not just a restrictive change in functionality. Thats a bug!

auldguy,

You can import playlists that have been created in other apps like Winamp. You have to change the backslashes (\) to forward slaashes (/), and add file://localhost, and it has to be a mapped drive letter - not a unc network path.

I think we all need to report it, then. We shouldn't be forced to waste our time with workarounds for this new issue, just because our preferred music player isn't iTunes.

I agree with scarlet23. Prior to the version 10.4, it was working flawlessly and importing m3u into iTunes was a piece of cake.

When I synced my iPhone with itunes, all the music got pulled off the iPhone because all my imported playlists were "empty" after the 10.4 update. I only sync with playlists....

My music is on a samba share, and I can't figure out a playlist path that iTunes will recognize.

So I am dead in the water until Apple fixes this bug, or unless someone has an idea how to modify playlists that point to a network share....

:<

I'm struggling with this problem as well. The "file://locahost/m:" prefix works for me. (All my music is on Linux machines and is made available by Samba to my last Windoze PC (which I must keep for iTunes).)

I noticed something else:

While testing, I used a playlist that was already in iTunes. That existing iTunes playlist is kept in a directory (Music) within the playlist area. Whenever I import a unchanged M3U playlist, the imported M3U playlist will silently be ignored and the existing iTunes list is 'used' instead. The imported M3U playlist will show up as an empty list...

This threw me off - I was thinking there was something wrong with the pathnames I tried.

It's actually OK - now I can just drag my 60 Music and 20 Speech playlists and iTunes will 'compare' them. The ones that turn out to be different will show up outside the existing directories (Music, Speech).

It would be nice(r) if the normal DOS style pathnames would be accepted again (m:\genre\artist\album\track.mp3).