M3U Playlist support vanished in Traktor 3?

J0J0 · 2022-07-09T21:43:42+00:00

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Hi,

recently I wanted to play my tracks at a friends computer. I still use Traktor 2. He's got Traktor 3. It seems that the opening/importing of M3U playlist files is not possible anymore in Traktor 3. It was possible in Traktor 2.

Is it really not a feature anymore or did I just not find the functionality in Traktor 3?

Thanks for any hints and all the best,

Jojo

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Kaiwan_NI

Hi! Traktor Pro 3 supports M3U file, but you'll have to import your music into TRAKTOR's track collection first for the playlist to work. Here's how you can transfer collections:

How to Transfer TRAKTOR Collections, Playlists, and Settings to Another Computer

lord-carlos

Traktor can import m3u files just fine. I don't have traktor in front of me right now, but I think it's right click in the playlist browser and then you find something with import from playlist file or something like that.

Just not m3u8, which are just utf8 encoded m3u files ..

J0J0

Hi @Kaiwan_NI

thanks a lot for your answer. Is it possible that I was looking at a Traktor 3 "light" version instead of a full "Traktor 3 Pro"?

This morning I downloaded "Traktor 3 Pro" Demo and realised that everything is exactly as it used to be in Traktor 1 and Traktor 2. I even tried out what happens when I just click an M3U File without prior importing anything to my collection - It behaves the same as it ever was: All unknown tracks are automatically imported to my Collection and I can sort by metadata tags within a couple of minutes. Nice!

J0J0

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/24869#Comment_24869

Hi @lord-carlos

also thanks a lot to you for your answer!

it seems to be that everything in Traktor 3 is exactly as it was in Traktor 2, even the fact that files ending in .m3u8 can not be opened with the "Right click - Import Playlist" context-menu. That brings me back to @Kaiwan_NI : It seems you are working in the NI-headquarters in Berlin :-) Would it be possible for you to pass on a feature request to the development team: Allow selection of m3u8 files in the import dialog. Certainly you might also just kindly redirect me to the feature request area which I was too lazy to look up by now.

And yes @lord-carlos , you are right, from a technical point of view, m3u8 is exactly the same as an m3u file but it claims that it's contents (aka the list of paths/files) is utf-8 encoded. The problem with m3u/m3u8 is that they are "only" de-facto standards that most people are referring to as this wikipedia entry being the source-of-thruth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U . Frauenhofer, which I think invented it back when they invented the mp3 format, did not define a proper standard for it. So this is all we've got.

As far as I understand it and sincde I was contributing to a FOSS project recently that required me to code generation of M3U lists, I do think that Traktor 3 already supports the reading of utf-8 encoded filenames within a textfile named "playlist.m3u", even if the file should properly be named "playlist.m3u8" - The current workaround certainly is to just rename the file's ending to being m3u. I am not 100% sure if this last paragraph is all true and there might be assumptions. I'll try to do my homework and some more tests but in the meantime @Kaiwan_NI , this might be stuff for the coffee/cigarette break with the coding team :-)

all the best and thanks again for your answers! Appreciated!

lord-carlos

@Jojo

Nope, I tried that as well. I had to convert my playlist to windows-foo whatever codec before I could import .m3u playlist that contained path with "special" characters.

It sucks.

And you can ask NI for as many feature request as you want. They have half a developer working on traktor. And that developer has to spend 1/3 of his traktor time on new paid features like the new limiter.

J0J0

@lord-carlos I think there is some frustration involved here already, but let's keep it polite. Thanks. I'm on a mac here, so things even within Traktor might be a lot different. I have only heard about that Windows doesn't use unicode by default but its own codepage codec thing....well...not sure I can help here.

J0J0

@Kaiwan_NI still I would like to know your thoughts on this post: https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/24956/#Comment_24956

It seems to me that Traktor Light does not support m3u playlists, can you confirm that?

Kaiwan_NI

Hi @J0J0 I double-checked with the Traktor team for you and they confirmed that LE can import/export in m3u and nml format, just not m3u8 as lord-carlos said.

EricEQ

Just figured out a way to get M3U8 Rekordbox playlist into Traktor 3 on a Mac! Once I got it imported, I just analyzed the playlist and it looks like all the metadata made it over.

Here are the steps I used:

1) Export playlist from Rekordbox as .M3U8 file

2) Open the .M3U8 file with "Text Edit" application in Mac

3) Open a new window in Text Edit and copy/paste the code form the rekordbox .M3U8 file into the new window

4) Save new file as .txt and choose "Western (ASCII)" encoding

5) In finder, change .txt extension to .M3U

6) In Traktor, "Import" playlist and it should recognize your new .M3U file (at least it did for me).

7) Jam on it

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