Hey, all:
Well, I purchased a couple of 8 GB microSD cards and planned to fill them with music files. When I did, I realized one of the current shortcomings of the G1's music app: organizing your music into playlists is a clumsy PITA.
On my card, I had folders with complete albums by individual artists. Making playlists from the albums was no problem. You open the player, press Albums, scroll for the artist's album, do a long press and add it to a new playlist. Simple.
Here's the problem: what if you have a folder (as I did) with a few hundred songs by different artists all mixed up. Well, you'd have to long press each song, one-at-a-time, and add it to a playlist if you do it on the phone. I don't have that much free time.
Well, it's not a widely-known fact that the G1 music app supports m3u playlist files (it's not well documented anywhere, so you need to search other sites to find this out). I read someplace that there are specific directions in the G1 manual on how you create a playlist. Well, I looked from cover-to-cover and didn't see a word about them. (Note: I discovered this is in the user manual, but not the one that comes in the G1 box. Download the long one from this site and you'll find this information).
I did find that people who use Windows and Macs could use iTunes and WinAmp to create their playlists, but I'm a Linux user (specifically Kubuntu and KDE). So, for my fellow open-source geeks, here's how I used m3u files and saved myself a lot of typing.
1. You need a music application that creates m3u playlist files. Since the m3u is a widely-recognized standard, many open source music organizers should be able to do this. I used Amarok on KDE.
2. You can do this on your computer or on the microSD card, but I suggest doing it on the computer versus plugging the phone into the USB port, since creating the playlist will be faster on the PC or laptop.
3. Place your music files in a single folder. I have mine named with the type of music the folder holds.
4. Open your music app (Amarok in my case) and create a playlist using that folder. Amarok allow the user to simply drag the folder to the playlist window, where the files will be loaded and the playlist will be created for the application to use internally.
5. Once the files have loaded, save the playlist. Make sure the file uses the "m3u" extension, and make a note of where your application saved the playlist file. If you're given the option, save the file to the
same directory as the music files themselves. (Amarok saves the file to your .kde folder in your /home directory, so you have to hunt for it a little, unless you save it somewhere else).
6. Now, copy the folder with your music and the playlist to your microSd card, if you haven't done so already.
7. Mount the card in your G1. Open the music player and press the playlists icon. You should see the playlist with the file name you gave it when you saved it. If your playlist is very long, it might take the phone a moment or two to load it, so be patient.
8. Select your playlist and start dancing.
I created three playlists for three folders this morning before breakfast. The total number of songs was about 800, so I'm grateful that I didn't have to type all that out! By letting the application create the list, you're assured that the files will be listed properly, making them easy to find and sort by the G1.
As I mentioned earlier, this should work the same way for Windows/Mac users using iTunes or some other application. I'm focusing on Linux because...well, because it's my system and we need to support it.
Eventually, the Android developers will improve on the standard apps, and we'll get more choices from other developers. Until then, I hope this little tips saves everyone some time.
NEW!!!: Linux users can now speed up the process of generating playlists with a terminal application called Fast Audio Playlist Generator (fapg). The source is available at
http://royale.zerezo.com/fapg/ , though most of the more popular Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc) have the tool built and ready to download from their repositories. This handy item allows you to run one quick command against a directory full of music files to generate a playlist in your choice of formats. Fapg creates m3u files, so it's a handy tool to have around when you're loading up that microSD card. There's no need to load the directory of files into any specific application. Once you have fapg installed, creating a playlist is as simple as this:
fapg --format=m3u --output=/path/to/save/playlist /directory_of_files
This will create an m3u playlist of the files in /director_of_file and will save it in /path/to/save/playlist. To make this even simpler, you can just cd to the directory holding your music files and do this:
fapg --format=m3u .
Note the dot (.) on the end of the command, which indicates the current directory. This command will generate an m3u playlist of all music files in the current directory.
I hope this is helpful to my fellow Linux/G1 users.
