[HD2 General] arctic giraffe:
I've had a look at the posts already made on this topic - the most useful one I've found so far is TommyRose's post. (t=665484) (sorry not allowed to post links yet).

As I understand it we can't get at the native playlists that the manila player uses - they're somehow hidden away from us - not even in any file that I can find.

I also understand that it is supposed to be possible to sync external playlists directly from WMP. I didn't get very far with trying to do this, mainly because I don't want to use WMP.

I really wanted to use Winamp - it will happily sync to portable devices so I got it to do that (I made my HD2 look like a portable drive rather than using ActiveSync) - and it stuck an m3u playlist file on my device (in \Storage Card\Playlists [I set this up in Winamp preferences I think]) along with the music in the folder structure that I specified.

The playlist was in the wrong format - an m3u. But if you look inside this file it's easy enough to convert it to the asx format required by the Manilla player on the HD2 - which is definitely the player that I want to use!

The format inside the m3u looks like this:

#EXTM3U
\path_to_your_music_file\a_track.mp3
\path_to_your_music_file\another_track.mp3

But the format inside the asx file has to look like this:

<ASX>
<ENTRY><REF HREF="\Storage Card\path_to_your_music_file\a_track.mp3" /></ENTRY>
<ENTRY><REF HREF="\Storage Card\path_to_your_music_file\another_track.mp3" /></ENTRY>
</ASX>

Interesting point: the tags have to be CAPITALISED or the Manilla player won't show the track in playlist display.

So far so good - I can use my playlists from Winamp on my PC on my HD2 - after doing some text editing on it and renaming it to an asx (I made a perl script to do this automatically)

#!/usr/bin/perl

open FILE_A, "<", "$ARGV[0].m3u";
open FILE_B, ">", "$ARGV[0].asx";

print FILE_B "<ASX>\n";

<FILE_A>;
while(<FILE_A>)
{
my($line) = $_;
chomp($line);
print FILE_B "<ENTRY><REF HREF=\"\\Storage Card$line\" /></ENTRY>\n";
}

print FILE_B "</ASX>\n";

close FILE_A;
close FILE_B;

So now my external playlists show up with all their tracks in the manila player :)

The problems I'm having now:

1. If I use one of my asx playlists in the Manilla player and hit Menu:Properties It shows the properties of the track I'm playing - but it's missing some tag info. If I play the track a different way (without using the asx playlist) the tags show up correctly.

2. This is the most annoying: If I play tracks using one of my asx playlists and then hit Menu:Add to Playlist it shows me all of my native manila made playlists that I can add this track to ... but when I hit one of those the whole thing crashes "A problem has occurred with manila.exe" sometimes it says services.exe too. This only happens with the asx playlists - I can happily Add to Playlist using a track from one of my native playlists - or a track I've played by navigating to it another way.

This feels like a bug in the manila player to me :(

I'd like to know if anyone else has experienced these problems - and if they know of any solutions or ROMS that solve them? I'd love to have the ability to create favourites playlists on my device as I'm playing the music I've synced into it from winamp using my external playlists.

My HD2 is using:

OS 5.2.21869 (21869.5.0.82)

Manila 2.5.19211619.0

ROM 1.66.405.2(76641) WWE