I’m seeing some odd behaviour with my .M3U playlists and wondered if others had experienced the same.
I have about a dozen or so of these playlists created on my PC and playing through my Melco server. I get the same behaviour on both my ND555 and my ND5XS2.
If I open a playlist I see all of the expected tracks and I can click to play random tracks without difficulty. However, If I choose to play the playlist as a whole, it plays 2-3 seconds of the first track, then jumps to a different track.
Clicking into the play queue shows that it has loaded most of the playlist but misses the first 95 tracks. I’ve checked this behaviour with a couple of the playlists and it always looses 95, independent of the size of the playlist.
I tried a cut down version of the playlist with fewer than 95 tracks and that worked as expected, but a version with just over 100 still lost the first 95.
Is this likely to be a Naim issue, or possibly something within minimserver?
I’ve just tried using the mconnect app and that works perfectly - reads all tracks and play fine.
That suggests it’s an issue with the naim app. I’ll try to email Naim support.
I’ve been in touch with Naim support. They suggested trying to re-save the playlist within the Naim app. That works, and since I’ve only got a handful of other playlists, I’ll do this for each of them (although I think I’m right in needing to do this on each of the iPhones/iPads that we use).
They suggested the issue is caused by incompatibility with the Playlist Creator software. I’m pretty sure others must use this software to create playlist files. In fact it’s really just a text file that could be created in Notepad or any such text editor. Any further investigation would need to be passed over to the software team and there doesn’t seem to be a great desire to do that (I’m sure they’re busy with plenty of other more important issues).
I may start another thread to ask if there are others using Playlist Creator to build their playlists.
I was hoping for the text rather than a screen shot, but that aside I cant see anything that obvious, although as a general rule, I do tend to strip out any non alphabet characters from filenames. This was an issue a while back then fixed, but I find it best to remove them in the first place. ‘&’ were a particular issue IIRC, but I also remove things like ',! etc
That’s correct, playlists are stored within the app so are unique to the device on which they run.
If you want to transfer a playlist to another device you can easily do this manually. Play the playlist using the device on which you created it, so that it forms a play queue.
Then open the Naim app on your other device. You’ll see the play queue and you can save it as a new playlist. The only problem with this is that any future changes you make will not automatically be transferred between devices.
I don’t think it’s anything to do with unusual characters in file names as the behaviour is consistent across different playlists and when I cut down the playlist to the first 90 tracks it works perfectly.
" There is no formal specification for the M3U format; it is a de facto standard."
So we are very much reliant on the App that reads these files to cover as many different scenarios as possible. I’ve certainly had issues in the past which was resolved with the .m3u8 extension (to cover 8 bit filenames), and the simplification of file names. The other fix was to ensure Artwork is less than 1000x1000 pixels. (sorry, just remembered that one). Now my playlists are stable across a number of apps.
