Crumpled Thoughts

“Broken” is a harsh word, but it is the only way I can describe how Apple’s iTunes handles m3u playlists. My music library is over 108 gigabytes. 21,192 songs, a play length of 61 days, 16 hours, and 47 minutes. That is a lot of music to manage. I use gnump3d as the interface to listen to my music from any internet connected computer, and at home. It works swell.

I’m a long time winamp user. On Windows, Winamp + gnump3d is great. When I’m running on Linux, XMMS + gnump3d is great. Even running it on a friend’s computer with IE & Windows Media Player it works great. So why do I care about iTunes?

Apple has a really cool device™ — The Airport Express. You can plug the airport express into your stereo an send music to it over the lan (using a wired or wireless connection) using iTunes. It is so much more elegant than hooking your stereo to your computer’s audio port because only the music is sent to your stereo. Other sounds such as new mail notifications or annoying web page audio remains on your local speakers— rather than disrupting your tunes.

Now, with the 6.3 firmware update for the Airport Express (released on January 3rd) and iTunes 6.0.2, you can send music to multiple basestations. You could have 3 Airport Express basestations connected to 3 different stereos thoughout your house and send the same stream to all of them. Not only would your music distribution rock— you would have one kick-ass wireless network.

Now, back to the “broken m3u support” in iTunes. m3u is an audio playlist format, which originated with winamp for mp3 files, and is now widely adopted in many programs. It is basically a file which contains a list of audio files to play in sequence. gnump3d sends m3u playlists of albums, or custom playlists to the browser, which then hands them off to the default application for handling m3u files so you can rock. Pretty much every other application that supports m3u playlists will then parse the lists, and play the files in sequence. Apple’s iTunes takes the m3u playlist separates all of the entries in it, and adds them to the music libabry independantly. This behavior sucks. It makes it a huge pain in the ass to listen to a playlist in iTunes.

I had almost given up on using iTunes, until I came across this. The folks over at iTweaks.com have released a utility called M3U2iTunes, which is a helper application which overcomes the problems iTunes has with m3u playlists. It is available for both Mac & PC. Thank God for independent hackers who come up with easy solutions to serious problems.

-Chris