Multiple Playlists Supported? Yup!!!

[philaudio]

Well this was the ONE annoyance I had about my D2... NO PLAYLISTS supported... then after some digging & figuring it out I figure I'd post this out for anyone who have a need for playlists. Not the most convenient way to make a playlist but hey, at least you won't be forced to listen to one DPL list ;)

1) Make sure that the USB mode for your player is set for MTP in "Settings" of your player.
2) Upgrade your Windows Media Player to version 11 if you havent already. Otherwise #1 will have your player show up as just 1-2 drive letters instead in My Computer instead of "Cowon D2" & prevent you from going onto next step
3) On "My Computer" your player should show up as "Cowon D2" and under there should be "Internal Storage" and "External Storage" if you have card installed.
4) Going into either Internal or External storage where your music is, right click on a folder that has some music & click on "Create Playlist".
5) So you don't have to go through step #4 every time you want to make another playlist file copy the newly created file (#4 can be annoying if you picked a folder that has alot of music).
6) Double click this playlist file, then drag & drop any of your music files to this list & delete any files you don't want on there.

After tinkering around just click the "OK" button on the list to save your playlist edits & voila!!!

Now whatever playlist is on the player (or card) should show up under:

BROWSER -- Music List -- MODE -- Music Library -- Playlist

Hope folks finds this info useful as this player now gets a jump from being a 85 to a 95 in my book :D

[CvP]

nice! somebody check it and see if it really works.

[Kibi]

Woohoo!

Finally managed to get a set of playlists onto my D2!!!

Thanks Philaudio for the pointers, though I was worried because I wanted to do OGG files which I could not figure out with Windows Media Player

OK, so it's still a bit arcane, but I use Quintessential Media Player from http://quinnware.com/ - I have to do the following steps:
1) Make sure that the USB mode for your player is set for MTP in "Settings" of your player.
2) I guess use the latest QMP - I use Development build 118 I have no idea whether older versions work.
3) When you plug in the USB Windows pops up a dialog and one option is something like "Manage this device using Quintessential Media Player"
4) Now you get a display with different panes - In the bottom left you can see something saying "My Devices" - underneath this you will see "Cowon D2"
5) Now, this may just be coincidence, but it just so happends that my musuc files on my PC are stored in exactly the same directory structure as on the D2 i.e. c:\Music\Artist\Album, AND I have made playlists (.m3u8 files) which all sit in c:\Music on my PC.
6) While standing on the D2 device icon, click on the item on the bottom of the screen which says "New Playlist" and give it a name e.g "Pink Floyd - The Wall"
6) Above the "My Devices"area is a "My Playlists" area which has all my m3u and m3u8 playlists created in QMP. - I l click on playlist e.g. "Pink Floyd - The Wall", and the list of files opens up in the bottom right pane.
7) Scroll down in the bottom left pane so that your new (empty) playlist is visible. Highlight all the items in your play list (ctrl-A) and drag them onto the icon for your new playlist (on the device)
8) A dialog will come up "Duplicates in Queue" "There are files in the transfer queue that are already on the device". If you click "Skip Dupes" nothing will happen so you have to click "Overwrite dupes". Sometimes, the application seems to think it is writingout twice as many files as it really is, but it works out OK in the end.
9) Now whatever playlist is on the player (or card) should show up under:

BROWSER -- Music List -- MODE -- Music Library -- Playlist

It works for me - now just get gapless playback and I'kll be happy

[mindcontrol]

thanks for this phil

[mindhead1]

Tried this with firmware:2.54 and it doesn't work. I can create the list but I can't see it on the player in the play list menu.

[PsycoGeek]

My question is can you make multiple playlists like this? I haven't gotten that far with testing it. I just got my D2 a few days ago, and have only gotten my file server back online with all the music rips this morning around 4am.

BTW, this works with firmware 2.57

[CarlAS]

Same here.

[flacjoyce]

Hi Kibi, Hi everyone!

Do you know if playlists can be exported to the D2 using Quintessential Media Player as you descibed if the files are in FLAC rather than OGG?

I had a live chat with Cowon tech support and they said you can't sync playlists to the D2 using JetAudio (JetAudio does allow you to make playlists in FLAC or OGG to play on your PC)

and they said FLAC and OGG don't support playlists. As Kibi points out, this isn't really the case with OGG. Does anyone konw how to get multiple playlists in FLAC onto the D2? I really hope it's possible!

[sprockkets]

It's a problem with the MTP protocol itself. Apparently Microsoft didn't think that .ogg and .fla are music files so they do not allow using them in playlists. There currently is no way around this, unless they change the spec.

[dizgotti]

This was all done using a Windows Vista 64 bit machine, but i would hope it works for anyone with windows.

The method below also works with flac. And the original post works with flac. Make sure to do all changes using windows explorer and not any media players. I converted a few cds of mine to flac and tried the Properties tab->References approach listed below and it worked just fine.

Not only does this work,but it also supports creating multiple playlists for external flash memory as well. Here is how to trick it into working. Open up MyComputer in folder view or windows explorer and select your Cowond2.2.01 or whatever it is called, then go into the "Internal" section and navigate to where your music is. Right click on any(a small) folder and select "create playlist". After creating the playlist, right click on the playlist and choose properties. Select the "References" tab of the properties to see all the files associated with the playlist. select all the files and delete them. Now open up in another window the "External" drive and select all songs/folders for the new playlist. After selecting, drag them into the "References" window of the "Properties" of the playlist and wait for it to repopulate the list of references. VOILA!!! you now have a playlist for your "External".

Another trick i found useful is if i want to create multiple playlists on my external drive. I create one playlist using the right click on any Internal song/folder, but then after deleting all the references i copy the file numerous times. This creates several empty playlists which you can use with the above mentioned method for creating several playlists using a drag drop approach in to the references of the properties tab.

I still havent figured out what erases playlists, but every now and then i connect to my computer and the playlists erase, so do keep this in mind. Maybe avoid creating too many playlists. And since they are all metadata or something you cannot simply save them and reload them, but rather have to create a new one every time.
:hurray:
oh and i forgot to mention i have a D2+... and i love it!

[dj_si]

I just wanted to say a HUGE thank you to both philaudio and dizgotti for this advice on playlists. Having received my brand new D2+ only 4 days ago, this morning I finally had the chance to sit down and take a proper look at it, and most importantly, I wanted to work out how to set up playlists.

After 5 solid hours of downloading, installing and experimenting with various media managers (MediaMonkey, Cowon JetAudio, J.River Media Jukebox - none of which successfully created playlists :mad:), and also reading about m3u-to-pla converters, I finally stumbled upon this thread.

This method of creating playlists via regular Windows Explorer with the D2+ in MTP mode is (in my opinion) ridiculously easy, and from my tests so far, it seems to work fine with both OGGs and FLACs, whether they are stored on the internal memory or on the external card - FANTASTIC!! :hurray:

As far as I can tell, this means that I can set my D2+ to MSC mode in order to drag-and-drop music onto it (or for the SDHC card, I can even remove it from the D2+, plug it directly into my PC and drop stuff onto it directly, which I believe allows much faster transfer), and then susequently switch to MTP mode in order to create my playlists.

Consequently, this would mean that I could do everything via Windows Explorer, i.e. no need to mess around trying to sync via media managment software! :D (Mind you, I'll still be using MediaMonkey just to edit tags.)

I must say, being somewhat of a geeky UNIX programmer, I've never been a great fan of doing things through Windows Explorer. However, this process is SO easy, I'd be mad not to use it! ;)

Thanks again!
Si

[dj_si]

Hmmm, from further experimentation I've found out something - once you've created some playlists in MTP mode, you cannot switch back to MSC mode!

I tried switching back to MSC to drag-and-drop more files onto the internal memory, but the next time I switched on my D2+ it updated its internal database and all my playlists vanished! I even tried updating only the SD card by removing it, slotting it directly into my PC and adding files, and then putting it back in the D2+ (which had remained switched off the whole time). But again, the result was either corrupted or missing playlists. :mad:

So it seems that playlists and MSC mode are mutually exclusive - you simply cannot have both. :(

[Darklighter]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I do not seem to be able to add songs to an already created playlist (only remove/change order)... is this right? Or is there some other trick to it?

[dj_si]

Once you have the playlist open and you can see the "References" (i.e. existing list of tracks in the playlist), you can then add more tracks by dragging and dropping more MP3 files into the References window. Then you can reorganise them after adding them.

[TommyJay]

Thank you very very much for this "how to" and I mean all you above who showed us newbies how to create the playlists. I am actually discussed that Cowon is not imbarrassed about not being able to create playlists since they support and use Jetaudio as their editor. Maybe to some people that is not important but to many it is very very important.

Please don't get me wrong I love my D2 but I sincerely hope that the Cowon people get on the band wagon and take advice from you people above who showed us this "How to create multiple Playlists".

Thank you again for making my D2 more user friendly for me.

Cowon support I hope you read these forums and start looking after your people who buy your product. If we are unhappy and don't buy then you know you would be out of a job and by that I mean Cowon would go under.

Think about it.......
TommyJay

;);)

[Ken Rahaim]

Not only does this work,but it also supports creating multiple playlists for external flash memory as well. Here is how to trick it into working. Open up MyComputer in folder view or windows explorer and select your Cowond2.2.01 or whatever it is called, then go into the "Internal" section and navigate to where your music is. Right click on any(a small) folder and select "create playlist". After creating the playlist, right click on the playlist and choose properties. Select the "References" tab of the properties to see all the files associated with the playlist. select all the files and delete them. Now open up in another window the "External" drive and select all songs/folders for the new playlist. After selecting, drag them into the "References" window of the "Properties" of the playlist and wait for it to repopulate the list of references. VOILA!!! you now have a playlist for your "External". For all those who contributed to figuring out how to make playlists work with the D2 and D2+, thanks for sharing your efforts and results!

I've finally figured out the "rubics cube" puzzle of getting flacs on my D2+ and also being able to use playlists. As others have discovered, getting flacs on your D2 via a PC using mtp is problematic because of some issue w/ MS. Fortunately for me, I didn't have the problem w/ my MAC. They transfered w/ no problem via mtp. Now that the flacs are on my D2 I'm able to connect my D2 to my PC laptop and use Windows Explorer to create playlists as described above.

As someone else mentioned in either this thread or another thread somewhere else (maybe the "anything but ipod" forum), its a real shame that cowon couldn't make this more simple. Despite the superiority of flac over compressed formats and the better sound quality of the D2 over the ipod, none of that matters compared to the ease of use the ipod ecosystem (as I've heard it called) for the masses. When you've got to jump through the hoops that we have to to get your tunes on your player and to get your playlists to half-assed work then the ipod will always win out in terms of bulk sales.

Having said that, now that I've got my setup working relatively painlessly I can bask in the smugness of getting the best SQ out of my flacs and D2+ over anything the basic ipod can get :p.

[dragon0788]

thanks for this phil

[BudCrow]

Tried this with firmware:2.54 and it doesn't work. I can create the list but I can't see it on the player in the play list menu.It works!And for flac!

[king smith]

You can use the drag-and-drop features of Syncopation to manually copy playlists from one computer to another. In the source view pane, click a playlist and drag it from a remote computer onto your local computer. This will transfer the playlist and all of its contents onto your local computer from the remote. You can also transfer a playlist in the other direction, from the local computer to the remote. You cannot, however, copy playlists from one remote computer to another remote computer.

[Goost]

Thanks for the guide!
Is it just me, or are the playlists limited to 400 songs only? I'd love to be able to have more in a playlist, since I got around 3000 songs total on my D2+.

[sshayndell12]

I wonder if there is a software problem with ours or if we are just not adding these multiple playlist the right way

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[bardrick25]

It's a problem with the MTP protocol itself. Apparently Microsoft didn't think that .ogg and .fla are music files so they do not allow using them in playlists. There currently is no way around this, unless they change the spec.
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[jfalk]

WMP now supports ogg files in the library. You simply have to install WMP Tag Plus at http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/index.htm?http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/wmptagplus/ Seems to be working fine for me.

[colton1237]

I just got my D2 a few days ago, and have only gotten my file server back online with all the music rips this morning around 4am.

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[ajohns229]

Tried this with firmware:2.54 and it doesn't work. I can create the list but I can't see it on the player in the play list menu.
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