I tried to make up a few playlists today for my H320 iRiver. I am using vim to make them not an application and this had me stumped for a while.
Then I realised that the iRiver expects a DOS formatted file. Basically Linux text files use “\n” for a newline and MS windows uses “\r\n”. To get it to work I had to save the file as a dos file. This can be done in vim as follows.
:set fileformat=dos
For those that don’t like vim then a Perl one liner will do the same thing.
perl -i.bak -pe ‘s/(?<!\r)\n/\r\n/g;’ *.m3u
It is safe to run this on a file that has already been converted to the msdos format. It also creates a backup file in case anything goes horribly wrong.
So a simple example of an m3u playlist is as follows:
#EXTM3U
\cypress_hill\a_to_the_k.ogg
Of course the “\r\n” is not visible but its there 😉 The example m3u file above is in the ROOT directory of the mp3 player. Remember that on the H320 and probably on the other iRiver makes as well you need to use the A-B button to view your playlist when the player has stopped.