Hey Gang-
After many trials I figured out how to get playlists generated with iTunes on a Mac properly working with the Audi MMI on an SD Card. I have a 2011 A6 so it's the latest MMI (v3?).

Symptoms - My playlists show up in the playlists folder, but the playlists themselves would mostly show "No playable tracks found." (as others have pointed out here, you need to wait 5 minutes or so for the MMI to process the playlists - the folders show up grayed out until then). I also found some strange behavior where one or two songs would show up in a playlist containing 50 or 75 songs. By editing the playlists with text editor (on a Mac, this will be important later) i wasn't able to figure out any difference between the entries for the songs that worked and the ones that didn't. Also - strangely, the long playlists created with MMITunes worked fine, but they looked exactly the same in the text editor. I did notice that if i copied and pasted lines from the big playlist generated with MMITunes into a new, smaller playlist - that worked.

Solution - Line endings. I figured that it might be a problem with the Text file line ending differences between Mac and Windows - here's some background if you care: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline
In any case - you have to save you playlists with the correct line endings for Windows (CR+LF) as apposed to Mac (LF only). I use a text editor called Smultron that has this option. I changed open all the text files and changed the line endings to Windows (CR+LF) and now all my playlists work great! Apparently the MMI gets confused by the Mac/Unix line endings.

I like how iTunes sorts my music into folders by artist and album. So my new workflow is as follows: I copy the music from my itunes folder onto the SD Card. I copy everything under iTunes Music folder - so the path to a song on the SD Card is like this: "/Artist/Album/song.mp3" Then I export my playlists (I like the genius playlists) from iTunes saving as M3U format on the root directory of the card. These playlists will have incorrect paths since they will include the entire path from my MAC ("MacHD/Users/MyName/Music/iTunes/Artist/Album/song.mp3".) Then I use Smultron to open the text file and use advanced find and replace to remove the "MacHD/Users/MyName/Music/iTunes" portion of the path. And I then change the line endings to windows.

When I use the card I can browse by artist and play whole albums or I can play playlists for mixes. I hope this helps somebody who is having similar problems.

 

Hello there,

Great work I will try your solution soon, but I'm wondering is this folder structure on the SD-card slow for the MMI to read? How long does it take for your MMI to read the card when you start the car or insert the card? What is the size of your card (or how many songs do you have on it)?

In one other forum, I was wiggling with an optimal folder structure and playlist formats for the MMI (http://www.myaudiq5.com/index.php?/t...h__1#entry6372).

My solution was somewhat different, but from what I can see here, it seems that your method is better (if the MMI doesn't take too long to read the SD-card on start). I was experimenting with around 20GB of songs on 32GB card.

Cheers,

 

I think i've got about 8gb of songs on a 16gb sdhc card. I'd guess that It takes about 3 minutes for the playlists to become active.