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How to handle Playlists?

PUFFOLINO
over 2 years ago

No chance to do playlists correct - why there's no documentation?

My experiences so far:

  • Garmin Expres seems to see text files (*.m3u8) in the Music directory but nowhere else (Audiobooks, etc.)
  • When copying playlists onto the watch it needs to be reconnected before you will see them in Garmin Express
  • The Forerunner seems to scan all (?) directories and accept the playlist files
  • The text files do work when they are simple ASCII text files and the full path is given for a song (like "Music\Interpret\Album\Song.mp3")
  • But - my watch shows a "ghost" playlist and I am not able to delete it.

So I'd need some help:

  • How to get rid of the wrong playlist?
  • When Garmin will have identical handling on watches and the Express software?
  • When it will be possible to create/edit  playlists via Express or directly on the watch?
  • 0 over 2 years ago
    PUFFOLINO said:
    my watch shows a "ghost" playlist and I am not able to delete it.

    If you can't delete it using Garmin Express, then the ghost playlist should be found on the watch's file system in the folder Forerunner 955\\Internal Storage\Music. Select then delete the playlist you want removed.

    FWIW, if you have Windows 10 playlists created using Groove Music, then you'll also have *.zpl playlists. The extension is a remnant of Zune PlayList format. With Windows 11, Groove Music became "Media Player" and they dropped .zpl files for .m3u8 files.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to seilogramp

    Thanks for your response, anyhow that doesn't do the trick. The playlists there are okay but on the watch there is another one (with the same name as one of the correct lists).

    I didn't find this @#%^ playlist file on my watch so I believe there must be another file on the watch containing all playlists. 

    No idea what I can do - removed and added all playlists already. Maybe I should rename the Music directory and restart the watch...?!

    BTW I've made the playlists using a text editor and copied the files onto the watch (Windows 11). Since Garmin Express didn't see these files (also when exiting and reentering the music page) I did also copied playlists into 'Audiobooks'. These lists will never be seen in Garmin Express but are used on the watch. Not sure if Garmin Express or the watch itself removed one file and I have no idea where the songs are memorized.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to PUFFOLINO

    I'm pretty sure that Garmin watches have a file system which is inaccessible to the end user, and which also has redundant copies of certain information on the watch.

    Like if you delete your Sports folder (containing all the activity profiles), the watch will recreate them from its own copies. If you configure a workout interval on the watch itself, the workout gets stored as a FIT file, but if you delete that file, it magically reappears, with its contents intact. (I'm sure that file is used by the watch, since the watch will crash if you write garbage data to the file and try to open the workout.) Of course, there's a few things which aren't in the user-visible file system at all, like Wi-Fi settings and PRG files for certain types of CIQ applications.

    On my old 935, I had a kind of similar issue with activity profiles. I had been messing around with copying existing profiles and creating new profiles (from the "Other" activity) through the watch UI itself - at some point, a "ghost" profile got created and could neither be selected nor deleted. Every time I tried to create a new profile, it either failed or created a new inaccessible ghost profile. This was a problem since the watches have a hardcoded limit on the number of activity profiles.

    The only way I was able to recover from that issue was to reset to factory defaults, but obviously I didn't want to do that after a certain point. The issue kept coming back, though. It's *possible* that it might have gotten into this messed-up state because I was also hacking profiles by copying them off the watch, hex editing them and copying them back. Definitely when I did that, it caused weird graphical issues when reordering activities.

    TL;DR Garmin watches seem to have a "shadow" file system which is inaccessible to the end user, but also shares some redundant information with the user-visible file system. Sometimes they can get out of sync, especially when the user makes manual changes to the user-visible FS.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to FlowState

    Update - I renamed the three folder names Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts and restarted the Watch, the "ghost" playlist didn't disappear...

    ...so there's no chance to repair that -> a bug for me.

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Hello, I'm making a few playlists and import my music to my Garmin 645Music today.

    Here's how I do (there must be a lot of other ways, but this one works for me) : 

    On my computer, I put my files in a directory for each playlist I want to create 

    And I remove the spaces (underscores ?, I'm not sure how to call them) in the music files and to be safe I remove also the (,),&,!,.

    for example : if the file is I love your name.mp3, I rename it like that : ILoveYourName.mp3

    Then I create a playlist file with VLC media player, for example : directory1.m3u and save it in the folder where the mp3 from the playlist are located.

    The last part is to open the garmin express app, connect my watch with the cable. And  then, I select my watch in the app, select Music, check the path of the playlist and when Import the playlist, the application sends the playlist and all the mp3 which are in it on the watch.

    I hope it will help a bit.

    Have a nice day.