making a playlist

[Gomtu]

I wanted to ask if it's possible to create and edit a playlist outside the app that plays your music. The music players I've tried so far are pretty clunky about creating playlists. I'm wanting a better way to do it. Ideally I'd like to be able to do it from my Mac in that Android File Transfer app, or something else like it.

 

[EarlyMon]

Typically playlists are plain text m3u files in a specific format. I used to just make them by hand but now you can find playlist creators for Android and probably OS X.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U

Android File Transfer is just a file browser btw.

 

[EarlyMon]

Btw - have you looked at doubleTwist or iSyncr?

 

[Gomtu]

I did try Double Twist.

 

[EarlyMon]

I did try Double Twist.

I don't remember why but I far preferred iSyncr - mentioned it and a player (some players actually) in your other thread.

I've since gone to drag and drop but thought you'd want to know about the options.

 

[RazzMaTazz]

For PCs there are two, free, easy solutions... MediaMonkey & MusicBee. Not sure about Mac.

Android can read (industry-standard) M3U playlists, which can be edited with text editors. So if you can export an M3U playlist from your Mac's media player, then you can copy it to the "Playlist" folder on your Android device. The problem is that the file path-name for a song is often different between the Mac/PC and the phone. For example:
PC path-name: C:\\User-name\Music\Beatles\Rubber Soul\Michelle.mp3
Android path-name: /storage/extSdCard/Music/Beatles/Rubber Soul/Michelle.mp3

There are at least 2 solutions to fix the path-name mismatch.
1) The free app, Playlist Backup, can convert/translate playlists that have been copied from PC/Mac to Android. I haven't used it in years, but I think it either automatically figures out the path-name difference or (the first time that you use the app) you may have to teach it the path-names to your Music folders. I can't remember.
2) On the PC/Mac, you can do a series of find & replace commands to fix the path-names. However, for the PC (and I guess for Mac) there are free, open source programs that will do a batch find & replace on a folder full of M3U playlists (like "FNR" for PCs.)

FYI: When I had an Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) phone, I used MediaMonkey (MMW) on my PC and MediaMonkey for Android (MMA) on my phone in order to sync music and playlists from my PC to my phone, because using both MMW & MMA not only enabled playlist sync but it also enabled my old phone to read the metadata for my WMA files. But my Galaxy S5 reads WMA metadata, so now I no longer need MMA on my phone. I can just export the playlists from MMW and use the stock Samsung media player app.