New XC60 Playlists
 

Collected new XC60 from dealer yesterday.

Very impressed with car (so far).

One problem I have not yet found a solution for, is using Playlists on a USB stick.
According to the manual, the system can access up to 100 Playlists with a maximum of 1000 files per playlist.

I have tried using a USB stick with approx 1500 mp3 files saved in album based folders. I have tried a .pls playlist and a .m3u playlist each with a selection of tunes from the various albums.
The car does not seem to recognise the playlists, they do not appear on the screen. I can however choose individual tracks, artists, etc.

Anyone any suggestions?

See post #11 here: https://www.volvoforums.org.uk/showt...light=playlist

Thought I'd experiment with playlists again. Image 1 shows the folder layout on the Lexar USB stick. Image 2 shows the files in the album and image 3 the corresponding .m3u file contents. The playlists were created using sPlaylistMaker as in image 4 and everything plays as expected in the car.

Note that you should select 'No path' as the Path Type as Sensus will index the file locations itself. In this example the .m3u file is written in each folder. If you select 'Root folder(s) only' as the Write location along with 'No path' you get a warning that they may not play correctly. It produces a .m3u file as in image 5 where there are duplicate track numbers. I'll try this layout tomorrow and see whether Sensus makes sense of it (see what I did there?). I suspect it'll play correctly despite the warning which I guess is for playback devices which are dumb and cannot index the contents themselves.
_

*Talking to myself*...

Putting the playlist file in a higher level folder or the root doesn't work. It has to be in the same folder as the tracks it's referring to. Guess Sensus isn't so clever after all.

Tried various options, programs, tags, xml editing...wasted many hours and gave up.
Now just use random or browse for a specific album. Or for the truely random experience I say some words at the voice control and see what it come up with...

LOL - I had some great results when I told it to "go boil its f*****g head" when Sat Nav repeatedly got things wrong

:err::censored:

Yesterday's voice control dialogue was;

Me: Turn recirculation on
Car: Turning fan off
M: Turn fan on
C: Turning fan off
M: Turn fan off
C: raising temperature to 20 degrees
M: I hate you
C: Searching music and radio. Playing U2.

Do I laugh, or do I cry ?

The only command that seems to work 100% of the time is 'Take me home'. For a while it used to play the Phil Collins track of the same name but it's stopped doing that now.

Last week I was at a mate's house before going to the pub. We left his house and drove down the drive to his electric gates. To open them you dial their mobile number and your caller-ID is checked. If you're on the allowed list the gates open. So as we approached I said 'Call gate'. Nothing happened. Tried again, nothing. Third try: 'Searching music and radio'. Me: 'Cancel'. I then tried the steering wheel buttons to call up the phone menu. Buttons not working. In the end I picked up my phone and dialled it manually.

My mate, who is looking for a new SUV, said 'I couldn't be @rsed with that'. I think Volvo is still on his shortlist but he wasn't impressed.

Been playing with Playlists (groan), and actually got them to work.

However, it all seems to be one hell of a faff, so I (for one) don't think I will bother. I'll just create Playlists in Spotify and use that instead. If I listen to an album I have on my USB, I'll just listen to it in the order it is already in.

I have got multiple tracks for multiple albums of one artist to play, all tracks on one album by one artist but in a different order, and individual tracks, from different albums by different artists - so pretty much covering every eventuality.

I have even created a long, boring document showing how I achieved it if anyone is interested - I just need to figure out somewhere to host it to share it.

As a child of the Vinyl LP and Cassette Tape album era, the idea of a Playlist is something I have never really bothered with. I listen to an album starting at track 1, and listen in the order the artist/producer/mixer/company/whoever decided that I should listen to them in.

The thought of changing the order brings back memories of lifting the needle, and trying to place it carefully in the thin gap between tracks, Typically missing and either getting the last few bars of the previous track, missing the opening notes of the track I wanted, or (a punishable crime), slipping and hearing the needle gouge a huge scratch over 1/2 a track. Swapping between tracks on the A side and the B side was something which never entered my head.

The alterative, repeatedly hitting >>/FF until I was 1/2 way through the track I wanted, then swapping between <</REW and >>/FF till I found the beginning did not add anything to the listening of the latest Tape based album. Of course all this >>/FF and <</REW promptly resulted in the tape stretching or even snapping. Many a happy hour spent unscrewing a cassette tape, joining the snapped ends together with sticky tape, and trimming it extremely carefully so it would not foul the tape heads, before tying to find the small screws which had now fallen onto the carpet.

It is probably only about a year ago I created my first Playlist (to accompany me on a 5 hour bicycle ride), and that was just a bunch of albums (in track order). I now do have 2-3 playlists on Spotify, but not many.

As above, if anyone wants details, let me know. I will find somewhere to host and share my long, boring document :)

After originally asking this question when I first took delivery of the car I decided to have another look before the car went in for it's 3 month check.

I am pleased to report that I now have playlists working on mp3 files stored on a USB memory stick.

I have 5000+ mp3 files generally in album folders or in artist folders with album sub folders.

I have found that Sensus will not accept playlists in which the file paths start with a drive letter e.g. C: or a full stop (.) or a backslash (\) or forward slash(/).

The playlist generator I use is called "Playlist Creator 3.6.2" but it always puts as a minimum a \ or / at the start of each item in the playlist.


The solution I have found is this:

1. Generate your playlist using the full path option (e.g. C:\)
2. Save the playlist as a "m3u" file in the root of your USB memory stick.
3. Use a text editor (I use Notepad) to find and replace the all the characters at the start of each filepath (in this example "C:\"). Obviously you replace the offending characters with nothing.
4. Save the modified file.

Job done!

It can take a long time for sensus to recognise and read the playlist initially, I think this is to do with the cache stored on the HDD. But once recognised, "Playlists" appears to the right of "Genre" on the library selection screen, when tapped your playlists appear.

I found that after I had been using the usb stick with playlists and subsequently removed it to modify and add more playlists, that it took a 40 mile journey with four restarts before the playlists were recognised again. But they have been immediately available on subsequent use.

I have found no problems with long path names, some of mine are more than 60 characters long, also no problems with mp3 files located in subfolders.

It would have been much easier if Sensus had accepted \ as the start of a pathname.
I am now going to remove my USB memory stick to do a Sensus map update, it will be interesting to see how long it takes to recognise the playlists when I replace it.