December 01, 2010

Export Android Created Playlists To PC

From time to time I come across little things that are quite frankly annoying given the awesomeness of android. The lack of a Phone to PC export function for playlists is surprising and annoying

Scoured the web but could not find a solution until I came across Meridian Player. It does not have this function but it has something called PlayQ. Which allows the user to make playlists real quick hence the name. I also found you can enter whole playlist into this function. I also learned that the player kept each playQ plalist in a folder as a standalone file not database (which I suspect the stock player does)

In Meridian Player
  • Long press on the playlists you want to export to PC, a pop up menu appears
  • Select export to playQ
  • choose the appropriate name
  • choose audio type
  • Export as many playlists as you like using procedure above above
Now connect you phone via USB and choose Hard Drive Connection

Navigate to folder PlayQueues.
Inside will be all your playlist!

You may have noticed they are in .mpq format not .m3u, don't worry.

Its not complicated as its just a text file, here comes the tedious bit

Open the file with notepad++ (notpad opens too but is a real mess)

you will find a playlist like listing but with some tags e.g.
NB: yours will be different depending on the directory in which your music is stored
LocalAudio<>file:///mnt/sdcard/MP3/Alice Deejay/Alice Deejay - Alice
Assuming that you phone music library matches your PC all you have to do is replace the front portion of the above url with the computer url

Important: First delete the first line with a single digit in it
C:\Users\Administrator\Music/Alice Deejay/Alice Deejay - Alice
To change the whole playlist use the replace function. Now you will notice the URL is encoded, to uncode or decode it use a tool like on is website
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/

  • Copy the whole playlist and past inside the box then select decode. Magic!
  • Copy the decoded list and paste back in file and save
  • Change the file extension from mpq to m3u
  • load into you PC music player
  • Music!

This is quite a simple process, I am no programmer but I reckon it would not be such a hurdle to come up with a script/ batch file tool that can do all these steps automatically.

17 comments:

Beben Koben said...

Nice to meet you my friend...
This is great neo template I have ever seen...\m/

Anonymous said...

I have made playlists on my Android. They show up in all the native players but evidently are stored in a system folder. I have not been able to find a way to back them up. When I open the playlists in Meridian they are shown but when I long press they do not show up. After exporting a playlist that was there (not created on the phone) my other playlists disappeared! Fortunately they showed up again after a reboot. Evidently this method does not work for playlists created on the native player or one that uses the native database such as Poweramp (easily my first choice of players for the Android at this time).

diddy47 said...

the thing is ANY (eg. xxxxx) playlist you can see within Meridian player CAN be exported to playQ. Long click and select exportto playQ and select create playQ Name the playQ playlist to a name you will recognise or relevant eg xxxxxA.Done.
Mount the SD card to your PC and go to folder PlayQueues, your xxxxxA.mpq playlist will be there

Unknown said...

Really appreciate you finding (making?) this. I use my android to create playlists on the move for dj sets and really needed a way of getting them back into the laptop.

One thing i would like to do though is amend the track title to be artist/track.mp3. Do you know of this is possible as currently having to go through each one.

Many thanks

diddy47 said...

thank you for the comment,

can you give me an example of what you are trying to do as i am not quite sure i understand.

Unknown said...

Thanks for your reply (& apologies for the delay - forgot to tick notifications:)

Yeah i would like to be able to more easily change in notepad ++, so So to make it easier i was wondering if theres a way i can get the produced text file to add the artist name before the song title (as thats how my music is setup on my computer.

So -

LocalAudio<>file:///mnt/sdcard/Music/BassbinTwins/BassbinTwins - ESW.mp3

as opposed to

LocalAudio<>file:///mnt/sdcard/Music/BassbinTwins/ESW.mp3

diddy47 said...

hi

the thing is it would be quite tedious. short of syncing your music from the phone to the music from the pc i dont see how otherwise.

If the music files on the pc are the same as those on the phone(name and metafile and sub directory then only ) a change in directory is needed, hence my original post

the files have to be identical for the playlist to work, and the subdirectory as well,for ease of conversion...so that you will inly need to change the root directory as in the post

so syncing the music first would remove the hustle

Unknown said...

Thanks again for your reply mate. Looks like i'll have to edit each one then as before. I have a really big organised music collection, so when i sync my phone via media monkey it doesnt create the same file structure. The reason i need this functionality (editing playlists on the move and reimporting) is for dj gig preperation. Im sure there'll be an alternative at some point, but til then i think this is the only option, so i'll carry on with how it is til then. Thanks again for your help, and do let us know if you hear of anyone who writes the script to change to .m3u or any alternatives.

All the best

Anonymous said...

Hi everyone,while playing around with the instructions given by diddy47,I discovered how to backup your playlist on your sd card using a combination of 3 apps from the android market and part of the instructions given by diddy47. Apps required are Androzip,Meridian Player and SDMount,they are all free apps and no purchase required to download.This process seems long but its unreal simple,(1)Dowload all apps as stated above,(2)Go to your android stock player and create a playlist of your liking, if you already have a playlist made then on to the next step,(3)As diddy47 described in first part of post, "desregard the part about export to pc",
"In Meridian Player
•Long press on the playlists you want to export to PC, a pop up menu appears
•Select export to playQ
•choose the appropriate name
•choose audio type
•Export as many playlists as you like using procedure above.Navigate to folder PlayQueues using Androzip,it would be stored on your sd card.
Inside will be all your playlist that you exported to playQ in .mpq format not .m3u" Select any of the created playlist/s created and change the file extention name to "m3u", please note all that is being changed are the words and or numbers after the (dot.) (4)Exit Androzip, proceed by making SDMount a widget on your home screen,select, it would refresh saying in the notification bar "Your SD card has been scanned and remounted, SD Media Remounted" 'please note if you unmount your SD through the settings menu you will have to remove your SD card and put it back into device'.(5)Revert to stock media player,go to playlist and there you should find the name of your playlist/s made.You may see 2 of the same named playlist/s but that proves that it was backed up on the sd card.
Thank you for this opportunity, all credit goes out to kundaistreet for the blog site and diddy47 for his tutorial.

Buvette12 said...

hi nitzy,

i have been looking for you man, where are you @. hit me back om michael at newark12.co.uk

michael maposa

diddy47 said...

uha..my website is quite obscure enough...anyway what gives

Lee said...

I don't understand the important tip:
"First delete the first line with a single digit in it
Thanks for your help!

Lee said...

I don't understand the IMPORTANT TIP:
First delete the first line with a single digit in it.
and i cant see to get it to work...

diddy47 said...

hiya...haven't been checking up on the site for some time now but if you could send me an email with one of you mpq files I could try and sort it for you

did.dy.47@gmail.com

what i meant by that tip is that when you open the mpq file in notepad++ the first line of text is not a playlist entry but a number series.

delete this first line so that the playlist entry becomes the first line..otherwise even after doing all the steps the playlist would be broken.

Celso Paco said...

Hi, I am doing my exame paper about a Mozambican traditional music instrument "timbila" which uses matamba fruit as resonators. I would like to have permition to use your om my work. Best regards Celso Paco

diddy47 said...

celso...its ok to use it as long as it does not violate common usage copyrights

David said...

To encode or decode the URL, there is another great tool, must check it out
That tool is
url-decode.com