M3U support in the Cowon S9
(Fri 3 Jul 2009 11:56)

I've been having a long discussion with Cowon about the M3U support they've added to the S9. Here's the content of it so far. My comments are in normal text, theirs in italics:

Great news to see M3U support added in firmware 2.31b. Naturally I upgraded having requested this feature when I bought the wonderful S9.

The problem is that the S9 doesn't seem to be able to read the M3U files. They are shown under Playlists in the browser but when I select one, it just says "No File".

They are extended M3U as the firmware information says they ought to be and they look correct to me.

I'm attaching an M3U taken from the S9.

Hope this helps.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:224,Mario Vazquez - 4 The 1
F:\Music\RnB\2000s\4 The 1 - Mario Vazquez.mp3
#EXTINF:232,Kylie Minogue ft. Mims - All I See
F:\Music\RnB\2000s\All I See - Kylie Minogue Ft. Mims.mp3
#EXTINF:184,Kylie Minogue - All I See
F:\Music\RnB\2000s\All I See - Kylie Minogue.mp3

Are you saying any of the following (based on the differences between what you pasted in and what I have):

1) The S9 will only support M3U files for MP3 tracks, not Ogg?
2) The S9 requires the paths referenced in the M3U to include a dummy Windows drive letter at the front?
3) The S9 requires the paths to be \ delimited (Windows style) and that / (Linux) won't work?

I'm pretty sure it's not 3 as I replaced all instances of / with \ in an M3U and the S9 still behaved the same way.

Any of these would represent major breakage really - surely the S9 can understand paths that are relative to itself and there ought to be no problem with either using / or using Ogg files.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:294,Motherless Children
E:\Music\01-Motherless Children.Flac
#EXTINF:247,Better Make It Through Today
E:\Music\02-Better Make It Through Today.Flac

As you see above. The music files are located in the music folder of COWON S9. If the path is correct then it will work.

2) But surely the software just skips over it as it could be different on any occasion.

Windows has its main HDD as C: and lets say a DVD drive at D:. Attaching the S9 will mount it as E:. But the next time you attach it, if there's already a USB drive attached, the S9 will mount as F:.

So, surely it would be trivial to be able to be able to cope with paths that don't begin with a drive letter - adding support for the two major OSs (Linux/MacOS) that you support that don't use that style of drive nomenclature.

3) A similar point to 2) really here. Allowing the lines to be parsed by / as well as \ would open up support for non-Windows OSs.

When reading the line in, all that would be needed would be something like (in pseudo perl code:)

if ($line =~ m/^\//) {  # Check if the line begins with just a /
                        # indicating a UNIX OS being used (escaping of course)
  $line =~ s/\//\\/g;   # Replace / with \ with appropriate escaping of characters
}

This avoids - of course - a situation where a Windows user has a file with '/' in the filename that gets renamed incorrectly.

These trivial changes would mean that the M3U support would mean that the only functionality not available to Linux/MacOS users through mass storage would be album art (not a huge loss) and I could get the S9 supported in HAL for Linux (not sure how it works with MacOS I'm afraid) so that music players would be able to automatically sync with it - and write playlists.

It would also mean that those of us with a voice in the Open Source community could trumpet the S9 as the music player of choice - its quality already invites that and these relatively trivial fixes would seal it.

Please understand too that I'm genuinely trying to help - not just to be awkward, I love the S9 and I think more people should use it and those with whom I have influence are generally Open Source users.