Creating m3u playlists for Poweramp

Poweramp is my go to app for listening to audio files on my phone! It’s got features galore, equalizer and playlist support. But when it comes to playlists, things can get a bit wonky.

Traditionally what I do for my playlists is create them on my PC using a player like VLC that can save to M3U format. Then I copy the files over to my phone, and that should do it. Except in Poweramp, for some reason it doesn’t. Maybe it’s the character encoding, maybe some stray detail about the M3U format in VLC, but the songs don’t play.

I’ve tried several fixes, and finally came upon one that works for me. Like most other solutions, this one’s built for use on Linux machines. But at the end of this post, you’ll also find a solution using the Windows command line.

Creating your M3U music playlist for Poweramp

Let’s start by creating a directory with all the music we want on our playlist. It can be one directory, it can be multiple directories, whatever you need.

“You mean, I have to copy and work with music files? It’s not on Apple Music?”. Yeah junior, we work with music files here, like real men.

Now open the command line, and step into each of the directories you created. And use the ls command to output a listing of the music files:

ls -1 | grep -i mp3 > mylist.m3u

What’s the grep part do? It filters out anything that doesn’t contain “mp3”. Usually when you have music files, you’ll tend to have other types of files mixed in (like for example JPG album covers). To keep the playlist clean, we take those out.

The grep line is also important for another reason: when you ls and output to an m3u file, ls will create the m3u file from the start. And then ls finds that m3u file, and lists it in your playlist. So you get something like this:

See? If you don’t use grep, you’re going to get your m3u list inside your m3u list. And eventually Poweramp might see that, and you get a file not found error. Or, if it’s smart, it might decide to play your whole playlist a second time. Do not want… and that’s why we grep.

If you’ve got other types of music files (like FLAC), remember to change “grep -i mp3” to “grep -i flac” or else you’ll get a blank list. And if you’re got FLAC mixed with MP3 and other formats, well, don’t do that. It’s messy.

The resulting m3u file is a regular text file. If you want to edit it with a standard text editor, go ahead. By editing you can rearrange the playlist order, take out tracks, etc. I usually don’t bother since I use my playlists on shuffle most of the time.

And that’s it, copy the m3u file along with the music files onto your phone and Poweramp should read it without any problems. On your phone, remember to keep your m3u file in the same directory you originally placed it in. Don’t move it around “because it looks nicer if all my m3u files are in one directory”: you’ll mess up your playlist.

A quick example

So let’s say I have Enigma’s Platinum Collection and I want a playlist for CD1. And before everyone starts to question the legitimacy of my files… many, many years ago I bought the CD in all its glory and I still have it. Gedoutaaaaaaheeeeeeeere.

Just to show my problem, I load them into VLC media player and generate my m3u playlist.

If I run it on my PC, no problem. But when I copy everything onto my phone and run Poweramp, this happens:

Nothing plays, and eventually I get a “Too many failed files” error. I imagine it might have something to do with encodings (those %20 sequences in the file names), but frankly I don’t have the patience to start to mess around with character encoding problems.

So, I just step into my linux command prompt and do as I said in the previous section:

And I get a simple list of files, inside my m3u file.

Then I copy that over into my phone and let’s see what happens now inside Poweramp:

No problems at all. The files are recognized without any trouble, and play just fine.

Does this work on Windows too?

On Windows systems it works too, you just have to use the dir command.

Step into the command line and use:

dir /b > myplaylist.m3u

And do the rest of the steps: copy the files over to your phone, and you’re good.

But, in Windows there’s no built in grep, so you’ll have to open your m3u file with a text editor and remove the line with the the playlist file from it. Or, simply live with the file not found nuisance in Poweramp.