Why?#

My Short (True) Story#

I often use square brackets [ ] in my mp3 filenames. I’ve started to organize my offline music collection with .m3u8 playlists, saved via AIMP (my favorite audio player on Windows PC). However, I use ‘VLC for Android’ as universal player (all in one place) on my smartphone.

Soon, I ran into problem with square brackets in filenames inside M3U playlists in VLC for Android. On google, I found out that this is normal behavior for VLC, and developers won’t fix this (UPD: at least until 2023). Although, many people are suffering (me too). See linked issues and many posts on the Internet.

“OK, No problem!” - I thought. “I will replace brackets using percent-encoding.” (also known as URL encoding), i.e. %5B and %5D respectively. Later I found out that # sign also needs to be replaced with %23.

So this project (script) appeared.

Initial Logic#

  • It takes and read origin playlist file with absolute paths.

  • Then It cuts absolute (full) file path, leaving only file name (tail or the final path component in ‘pathlib’)

  • Then it replaces (substitutes) [ ] # with %5B and %5D and %23

  • Finally, it saves converted playlist file (with relative paths) by specified destination.

Take a look:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:123, Sample artist - Sample title
C:\Documents and Settings\I\My Music\Sample with [brackets].mp3
#EXTINF:321,Example Artist - Example title
C:\Documents and Settings\I\My Music\Greatest Hits\Example #02.mp3

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:123, Sample artist - Sample title
Sample with %5Bbrackets%5D.mp3
#EXTINF:321,Example Artist - Example title
Example %2302.mp3

Possible Roadmap#

As my personal project, I’d like to automate my other routine tasks related to playlists. That’s why I’ll try to implement the following features:

  • Displaying a full content of playlist file (ready in v2021.6.1)

  • Creating a playlist from tracks in specified folder (with relative or absolute paths) (ready in v2021.6.1)

  • Injecting (appending) one playlist into another (top or bottom) (ready in v2021.6.1)

  • Creating an empty playlist file (ready in v2021.6.1)

  • Copying and conversion paths to relative, without replacing characters (“make relative playlist”)

  • Creating CUE sheet file from text file with timing (similar to online CUEgenerator, which I use manually now)