saulrosenbaum.com / Simple Mac m3u Playlists

I recently started to explore other mac media players, iTunes has awesome functionality, but sadly it’s a pig memorywise, so my day to day music listening software has become VOX whose small footprint and clean UI hits all the right notes for me. I needed a simple way to create m3u playlist files (which are really just filelists saved with a ‘m3u’ file extension - every solution I could fine seemed overkill, most of the Automator workflows I found were predicated on you already having a iTunes playlist you wanted to export - I wanted just a clean ‘right/control click on folder full of music - ‘save as playlist’ kind of functionality.

Attached is such a workflow. I’ve used it successfully recursively on a folders containing 10,000 songs, and (although Automator takes a few seconds to actually startup) the action it self is pretty fast.

A few notes:

• It attempts to filters out the kind of CRUFT (.txt,.jpg,.png,.nfo) that you might have in a folder if you <cough>[acquire]</cough> music via some type of distribution network.
• It asks you what you want to name it, but by default it’s going to save it to your desktop.
• it includes subfolders as playlist items, VOX ignores these so I didn’t bother to exclude them - I suppose other players might actually choke on them so YMMV.
• The attached file is the full-fat editable automator workflow - you’ll probably want to save that as a finder plugin

I haven’t had any issues with it, let me know if you find it helpful.

DOWNLOAD: Create_M3U_Playlist.workflow