m3u Playlists regularly being rewritten

[andrewilley]

One thing I did notice (and this issue might have been present previously) is that even with the 'Always use UTF-8 for .m3u' option enabled, making some minor modification to a Unicode playlist that had a .M3U file extender (such as moving a single song up the list) results in an ANSII file being saved rather than the original UTF-8/BOM source format.

So poor Michael Bublé just got removed from Christmas!  The accented é in both his folder and filenames were saved in the playlist file as ANSII 233 (0xE9), which although it ought to be the same as the original UTF-8 0xC3A9, did not resolve to match the original directory folder/filename naming.

Christmas/Michael Bublé Christmas Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition)/02 - Santa Claus is Coming to Town - Michael Bublé.mp3
Christmas/Michael Bublé Christmas Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition)/01 - It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas - Michael Bublé.mp3

Using an extender of .M3U8 works of course, but is much less compatible with other programs which can read the UTF-8 data, but don't recognise the extender as a playlist. I think that when re-saving, it might be a good idea to mimic both the original text encoding format and also whether a playlist was created using relative or absolute paths.  

Andre

[maxmp]

@andrewilley thanks for the report, Andre, that option affected only playlists reading. I'll make it force UTF-8 for saving as well.

[andrewilley]

yes, following the UTF-8 setting for writes too would be good, and would solve the problem for me.

But perhaps it might be better check what format the file was originally created as, and always use the same format for re-saving? That could also be extended to resolve @ToG's original issue of his relative playlists being overwritten with absolute paths.

Andre

[andrewilley]

Thanks Max, 916 fixes the Unicode re-saving issue with .m3u file extenders.

Andre

[andrewilley]

On 6/13/2021 at 5:49 AM, ToG said:

My relative path m3u Playlists are regularly being changed to absolute path names

I've just noticed that in one of the recent updates, Max has also implemented writing relative paths back to playlists when you edit them, thus keeping any relative path formats as they were originally created. This will make syncing them back and forth with other devices much easier. And of course they are no longer auto-saved just by looking at the content of a playlist, only when you make an edit.

Andre