About 3 weeks ago, my wife and I took delivery of a new 2022 XC90.
I have been reading about all this trouble with Playlists and the Volvo Sensus USB music player.
Unfortunately, it seems that they still haven’t done anything with their rubbish USB music player.
In this day and age, it is absolutely awful that they can’t put together a player that plays simple playlists.
Just like EVERY other mp3 player available.
A friend came round last weekend with his 5 year old Merc and Playlists “just worked” on his car.
Anyway, to my point.
This thread has been about putting playlists into the folders that contain the actual music.
I think this is to make the Sensus player “play” an Album.
However, I find that it will play an album even without putting a playlist into that album’s folder
But a playlist isn’t about playing tracks within an album is it?
The idea is that a playlist should play tracks from your ENTIRE music collection.
IMHO, the best way to do this is to place your playlists in the root directory where you store your music.
But, we all know that the Volvo Sensus system doesn’t see playlists outside of the folder in which the music is contained. This lack of understanding is absolute rubbish and I understand the frustration of those of you that have posted these findings.
So, after a lot of “head scratching”, I think I have a solution.
Rather than use a Playlist Manager, I decided to write my own.
The idea is that there are two windows in my application.
One window allows you to browse through Files and Folders, then select and copy tracks to the second window.
There are various other tools (find tracks and reorder tracks etc) but the application can then output a file into the root music folder containing a playlist of the selected tracks.
A picture is worth a 1000 words so here is a screen dump of my application:-
View attachment 150635
All done using a PC (Linux I’m afraid) and then after the playlists have been created, all music directories including the playlists in the root can be copied to an external mp3 player (either a phone or on a USB stick)
This works fine for all media players except the VOLVO!!!
So, I adapted my application to “Export” as well as just “Creating a Playlist”.
When it “Exports”, it actually creates a completely new Album – Lets call it “Fred’s Album”.
The first thing my export routine does is COMPLETELY wipe ALL the Meta Tags inside the exported tracks.
It doesn’t damage any of the original music – just wipes all the id3Tags within the exported files.
This is to stop that awful GraceNote software “getting at the data”.
The subtle difference between these new “Exported” tracks and a “Playlist” is that a Playlist just contains “links to” the music whereas the Exported tracks are actual music tracks.
Before deleting the data completely, my application recovers the track names from the metadata and and uses them as filenames for the exported tracks. During the exporting process, it prompts for the name of an empty directory to store the new exported files. I then add my own metadata into the files – just giving it an Album Name and Artist – both of which are the name of the export directory prompted for above. I have left the Track Name metadata within the exported tracks, empty. To finish, I also create some Album Art for to make it look pretty whilst it is playing.
The end result is a bespoke album of music – say called “Freds Music” – with all the tracks having an Artist of (say) “Freds Music” and an Album name of (say) “Freds Music” with some common Album Art.
AND IT WORKS ON A VOLVO!!!
There are probably some improvements I can make but I think I am now a happy Volvo driver.