Obscure problem
Solution below
This is just background and ramblings about the problem, feel free to skip below to the solution.
It amazes me how the simplest of things can be so obscure and over complicated. It’s been many years now and I still have never found a good enough phone music player. I am one of the odd ones who refuses to stream music because I find it a waste of bandwidth and none of the streaming services play music I want to listen to. Never liked Pandora and I have tried various streaming services since and I find them all lacking in one way or another. Therefore, I have just continued to digitally horde music. I currently have a 103GB of alphabetically hand indexed albums of all kinds of music. That’s roughly 2,580 albums and 23,320 tracks. I love music and so I collect just about anything I can get my hands on. Most of the music I have is a result of me painstakingly ripping audio CDs one at a time. CDs I bought, CDs my friends bought, I adopted MP3s very early. My first MP3 player was an RioAudio MP3/CD player. I basically cannot function or think without music. Now I just purchase digital albums when I can afford to en masse.
Playlist editors for Android suck
To this day, Android seems to lack a decent enough music player that will simply just “add all files found in this folder”. People lean towards using ID3 tags, but the truth is everyone has a different opinion on how to organize their music. I have attempted to use things like Media Monkey and was horrified at what it did to my music library. I was smart to create a copy of my library on separate drive and let Media Monkey eviscerate it. It did some really terrible organizational things and that’s why I do it by hand and don’t trust ID3 tags at all. My ID3 tags are either non-existent or worse, they are wrong. One day, I will tackle this problem, but for now I am living off of the physically named files as that’s what I trust and curate.
None of the music players I have used have decent enough playlist editors. Their defaults are terrible because they are only as accurate as your ID3 tags are. I have no idea why you cannot just add entire file structures and be done with it.
How to manually craft a playlist for Samsung music
In order to do this you need to be comfortable connecting your phone to your PC. These instructions are for Windows and Samsung Android phones, but I would imagine the same idea can apply to just about anything.
On your PC
- Connect your phone to your PC.
- Access the phone’s storage.
- Go to your phone’s music storage location. For example: /storage/emulated/0/Music/Albums/
- In my case I have ALL of my music located in a folder named “Albums”
- For argument’s sake, let’s assume you do too.
- After navigating to your Albums folder (or equivalent), open it and highlight all or some of the folders in this root folder.
- Right click and select an option that says “Create playlist”
- Be patient because this can take a while if you have a lot of tracks loaded.
- This will product a file named “New playlist.pla”
- Copy the file to your PC
- Make a back up if you wish or a copy that you can change
- Edit the file using something like Notepad++ or equivalent
- Add to the top of the file: #EXTM3U
- Perform a find and replace on the string “/storage/emulated/0/Music/” and replace it with nothing (empty string)
- Save your file.
- Rename your file to anything you want, just make sure to change the extension to “m3u”
- Copy the file back to your phone. The location doesn’t seem to matter, but put it where you can find it if necessary.
On your phone
- Optionally, you can disconnect your phone from your PC.
- Open up the “Samsung music app”
- Click on the three dots in the top right
- Select “Settings”
- Select “Manage playlists”
- Select “Import playlists”
- From the list, look for your new playlist
- Click “Import” on the top right
That’s it you are done.
Conclusion
I know this is more of a me problem because I refuse to stream music, but I cannot concentrate unless I have the right stream of music. I don’t feel like training someone else’s streaming service to behave the way I want it to. Additionally, I have music that you cannot find on streaming services.
Well I hope this helps someone other than me. This was truly an obscure one.