[generaltso]

In previous vehicles, I've just left an iPod plugged into a USB port all the time for music. But since the Pacifica doesn't have a hidden USB input, I'd like to just put my music library on a low profile flash drive instead. That part's easy. But getting the playlists to work properly may take a little more effort. Has anyone done this? Is there a specific format the playlists need to be in for the Pacifica to recognize them?

 

[daniel9478]

Yeah, we're currently using the same (a 64GB low profile drive that just stays in the dash). I got playlists to work by doing the following from iTunes on my Windows 7 installation (on my MacBook Pro). Note that I intentionally keep an old version of iTunes there for compatibility with other stuff, but I would expect the process hasn't changed much with other versions of iTunes. Maybe there's a faster/better way or I'm sure there's probably a 3rd party program that makes this easier, but this worked for me:

- Load all source files onto the flash drive (I assume you've already done this).
- Open iTunes and import the songs from the flash drive and create playlists as you'd like.
- Export the playlists to the flash drive from a menu that's something like File > Library > Export Playlist (I'm not in front of that computer at the moment). I think I chose the .m3u format.
- Open the exported playlist file in a text editor and examine it. In my case, it had included the local drive letter in all of the paths. I ended up stripping that away so that all paths were relative and didn't depend on a particular drive letter.

I'm sure you could create the same file manually after you see the first one as an example, but it still might be more work to make sure every path is entered correctly, particularly with longer file names. Let me know if you still need help with this after trying it and I can get the actual drive from the car and see what the files look like.

 

[Autumn Thunder]

I used an approach similar to the one above.

After exporting the playlist to .m3u and opening it up in wordpad or a similar program, the files looked like this:

#EXTINF:352,The best is yet to come - Aoife NÃ* Fhearraigh
D:\Music\Music\Compilations\METAL GEAR 20th ANNIVERSARY METAL GEAR M\10 The best is yet to come.m4a

Essentially, since I don't have them organized in file folders on the drive, I stripped away all of the directory information to make it look like this:

#EXTINF:352,The best is yet to come - Aoife NÃ* Fhearraigh
\10 The best is yet to come.m4a


If you've moved the music into a folder on the USB drive, you'll have to include that folder name before the file name. It can be time-consuming to strip the directory names.
This thread on itunes help forum has a script that someone wrote to do the stripping for you. DISCLAIMER: I haven't used it and cannot vouch for it.

 

[generaltso]

Thanks Guys. I was able to get it to work. But now the Pacifica suddenly doesn't want to recognize the flash drive at all anymore. I'll have to keep messing with it.

 

[kshermy]

Music Playlists

I used an approach similar to the one above.

After exporting the playlist to .m3u and opening it up in wordpad or a similar program, the files looked like this:

#EXTINF:352,The best is yet to come - Aoife NÃ* Fhearraigh
D:\Music\Music\Compilations\METAL GEAR 20th ANNIVERSARY METAL GEAR M\10 The best is yet to come.m4a

Essentially, since I don't have them organized in file folders on the drive, I stripped away all of the directory information to make it look like this:

#EXTINF:352,The best is yet to come - Aoife NÃ* Fhearraigh
\10 The best is yet to come.m4a


If you've moved the music into a folder on the USB drive, you'll have to include that folder name before the file name. It can be time-consuming to strip the directory names.
This thread on itunes help forum has a script that someone wrote to do the stripping for you. DISCLAIMER: I haven't used it and cannot vouch for it.

I believe you will find you don't need to work so hard on this. You probably will not need to edit playlists at all. The drive letter is just ignored and only the path portion needs to be correct. If the music files exist in the directories specified they will play with (Export from a music players like iTunes or the Windows Music Player). I have only tested mp3 and Apple m4a music formats and have only tried the .m3u playlist format but I expect other formats work well also.

I find the Pacifica Media app automatically loads multiple playlists, multiple folders, scans the music for ID3 tag info such as Artist, Album, etc, and additionally groups this info too making all that available with the Browse button. I think USB media music works nicely but, note it takes a while to scan your music on the initial load.

Simplest test is to just export a playlist or two and the music to a USB drive using iTunes or WMP, plug in the drive and see what happens.

 

[recobb]

I use the venerable Winamp (still available at the website by that name with a com extension), which, while no longer being updated is still my preferred mp3 player. If you open your music files in Winamp directly from the USB drive, and then write your playlist to the root of that drive, then the paths will be local and correct, no editing required. Use the m3u option, the Pacifica player does not seem to recognize the m3u8 (unicode) format.

It may well be that others, like itunes, *may* save only the local path if you write the playlist directly to the USB drive. But it does work with Winamp for sure.

 

[lbckev]

I found a really easy way to create playlists that Uconnect will recognize, and play my songs in the order that I want, not just alphabetically. I used a free program called m3u Creator that I found on Download.com. It works kind of differently, so it took me a while to understand it. When you download m3u Creator, it just downloads a zip file, which you have to unzip. You will then see a file called m3u_creator_acp.bat. This is called a batch file. Save the m3u_creator_acp.bat file to a place on your computer where you will remember where it is. You will be copying and pasting this file into your music files in order to create your play lists. Here is how I did it:

Copy music onto USB drive. I sort my music into folders named for the Album, such as The Beatles – 1, or Deep Purple - Machine Head, etc.

Open album folder in windows explorer (so that the songs are displayed).

Put songs in the order you want them to be played.

Copy and paste the m3u_creator_acp.bat file into the open album folder.

Click the m3u_creator_acp.bat file in order to open it. It will immediately create a file called “playlist.m3u”, and place it in the folder along with the songs.

Right-click and then Rename the playlist.m3u file to the name of the song album (keeping the .m3u file extension).

That's it! Do this for all album files on the USB. The songs in each album should now play in the correct order as a playlist. Remember to select Playlists from the browse list instead of Folders.

You can create playlists in other programs (like MP3-Tag or Itunes), but you must then edit the m3u files in order to get them to work with Uconnect, and it's a pain. I wish I had found out about m3u Creator before I had to edit the 30 playlists I created the other way!