What is the difference between formats when exporting playlists in iTunes?

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What is the difference between formats when exporting playlists in iTunes?

The available options are plain or unicode text, XML, M3U and M3U8 when exporting a playlist. Is there a difference in "functionality" of a particular format or is it merely a matter of compatibility with a particular platform or software? In particular I am trying to figure out if a playlist from iTunes would be able to be read and "processed" on a flash drive plugged into a late model car stereo which has a USB port.

MacBook 4,1 (13-inch Early 2008)

OSX 10.6.8

iTunes 11.3.1 (2)

MacBook (13-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Oct 27, 2014 9:46 PM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

Level 10

272,707 points

Oct 29, 2014 2:34 AM in response to DigiMacLeigh

.m3u8 should be the same as .m3u but with slightly different handling of Unicode characters that fall outside of the standard set of ASCII symbols. iTunes can import and export all three formats but .m3u is probably the one your car stereo will be looking for. iTunes will export a playlist with absolute file paths for each track however for your purpose what you probably need is all of the tracks placed in the root of the drive and to edit the .m3u file to exclude all but the filename so that a relative link from the same folder as the .m3u identifies the file.

I wrote a Windows only script for this task a while back, as discussed here: Re: Copying playlist to USB ?

This might also be useful: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/m3unify.php

tt2

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