I got a SanDisk Clip Sport the other day and became exceedingly vexed by my inability to get an ordered playlist working. I’m using Ubuntu, and here’s the secret that finally got things going.

The requirements

I had a few things I wanted to accomplish with the Playlists

• Be able to arrange the order of the songs any way I want
• Not have to manually write out all the file names
• Actually have the playlist load (and work) on the SanDisk

I finally found an app called PuddleTag (it’s in the Ubuntu Software Center) which will create M3U playlists and let you arrange the sort order of the songs. Only problem was the playlist file always showed up empty in the SandDisk player.

The secret to success

I finally figured out that the file was being saved with unix line endings and it needed to be dos. The quick fix was simply to open up the file in vim and change the file format to dos.

:set ff=dos

So… the way to get this working is

• Make sure your M3U file is formatted with dos line endings
• Put the M3U file in the same directory as all your songs (there may be other ways around this with relative paths, I just haven’t played around with that)
• Since the M3U playlist file is in the same dir as the song files, just write the song file name. You don’t need to worry with paths.

And that’s it. Happy listening!