One Music Playlist with tracks on Two Hard-drives.

[danschn]

I keep my digital music on two different disk drives, one internal and one external, on the same computer. I've published both top-level folders to TiVo Desktop, and successfully play music from either drive, which the TiVo serves to my audio amplifier.

I created a large playlist (M3U of course) for a party, which consists of certain tracks from both drives, and the playlist works as it should in Windows Media Player. I see the playlist just fine on the TiVo and can play it.

The problem is that it is only playing music that sits on one drive - the external drive, and completely ignoring all the tracks that reside on the internal drive.

I've thought of a couple of workarounds, as the party is this Saturday, such as moving all the music to one drive, and copying all the playlist tracks to a folder that live on one drive. But I'd rather it just work as I intended and it seems it should.

Edit:

As an experiment, I just created a new playlist populated with songs only residing on the internal drive. The TiVo sees the playlist, but when I tell it to play it or just look at the tracks, it sees nothing playable.

[danschn]

A further follow-up: I looked at the contents of the playlist - the M3U file - with a text editor. I use Windows Media Player to write the file and for the hard-drive that "works" it writes the whole file name, as in:

"F:\Music\Dave Brubeck - Time Out\03 Take Five.mp3".

For the hard-drive that doesn't work, it abbreviates the file name, as in:

"..\ARTISTS D\Dr.John - Dr. John's Gumbo (1972)\01 Iko Iko.mp3"

The ellipsis, "..", stands in for:

"C:\Users\Public\Music"

I've replaced all instances of the .. with the above string in the text editor, but when I save the file, Microsoft thinks its a text file, and no longer an m3u file, so TiVo doesn't recognize it either.

Is there some way for WMP to not truncate the file names, but write them out whole?

[msmart]

I've replaced all instances of the .. with the above string in the text editor, but when I save the file, Microsoft thinks its a text file, and no longer an m3u file, so TiVo doesn't recognize it either.
If you open the m3u file with Notepad, when you finish editing, do a Save As, change the type to All files and add the .m3u extension to the file name. This will create a file that's still a playlist.

As for not truncating the filename string, that just might be what WMP does for files in the default directory per the Options settings. May be no way around it. I use iTunes for managing my music files.

By coincidence, I just *bought* TiViTunes (http://www.maximized.com/shareware/tivitunes/) today to publish more than 5-songs per playlist (which is what the unregistered version allows).

[danschn]

I've solved the problem, although it's a workaround, and I think WMP is at fault for the text it puts into the M3U file it creates. I found that when I told it to save the playlist, it assumed I wanted it saved along the same folder path as the music folder on the drive where it truncated the folder path. I think it ought to have written out the full path, but I couldn't make it do so. It did write the full path for the other drive, the one that worked in the playlist. So I used "Save As" and told it to save the playlist on a still different hard-drive, and that forced WMP to write out the full folder path to tracks on both drives. I then published that path to TiVo Desktop, which then did fine with the completely written playlist.

The other alternative, in Vista, was to edit the m3U file with a text editor and save it. Putting a ".m3u" at the end doesn't tell Vista that it's a playlist; it just thinks it's a text file with a funny name. You need to open the folder with Explorer and click the "Organize" button on the Explorer toolbar, then click the "Folder and Search options" item on the drop down menu. On the resulting dialog box, make sure the "Hide extension for know file types" box is unchecked (probably by clicking it to uncheck it). The result is that now the extensions of the files will be displayed, and will be available to be changed to your liking.