HTC Audio Manager - Playlist sort solution found

[Avatar28]

I have found a (fairly) simple solution for how to have a playlist in the HTC Audio Manager that is sorted by something besides alphabetical order. It's really more of a workaround, but at least it's something.

As you probably know if you're reading this, when you use the HTC Audio Manager and go to create a playlist, all of the songs are presented in alphabetical order with no way to sort them any other way. The names given are short enough that you may not even be able to differentiate songs if they have similar names. E.g. on Pink Floyd's The Wall, you have 3 songs called Another Brick In The Wall. The HTCAM doesn't given you enough name to differentiate them just by looking.

Anyways, if you want to have a playlist sorted by name you either have to look at the album and select the songs in order, rather a PITA; OR you can open up Media Player on your device. Queue up the songs you want into a playlist there and then save it. HTC Audio Manager has the ability to open audio playlists and will search your playlist folder by default. When you go back into the Audio Manager you should see the playlist you created in WMP if you go to Playlists. It will have a Windows Media Player icon next to it and you won't be able to change the playlist, but at least everything will be in order. If you use WMP on your PC to sync music to your phone, you can create the playlists there as well and they should carry over. Although I'm not certain on this since I've got a couple of WMP playlists that didn't carry over. But those were there before I flashed the ROM and might possibly not be saved in the correct location for the Audio Manager to pick them up.

I know it's may not the most elegant solution and certainly not as good as native support, but it is something that really bothered a lot of people. I know that for me it was a deal breaker but I can tolerate this workaround.

[KonAitor]

can anyone confirm the ability to create playlists on the PC and move them to the phone? I have yet to be able to do this.

[cornelha]

Something that really grates me about AudioManager is the ability to piss me off by adding ringtones stored in my storage card to the library. If anyone knows who to add exceptions to certain folders it would be really awesome

[andbb]

After pulling half my hair out, I decided ot do this right, and found the way to transfer a playlist with appropriate sorting from Windows to my HTC Touch Pro Audio Manager.

The clue appears to make sure that all references in the playlist are relative to the location of the playlist. I.e. you must store the playlist on the same location as the files. To get this to work I had to work with the TouchPro as a disk drive - which assigns a drive letter and makes things work better in Windows Media Player.

a) Open WMP on the PC
b) Enter “Library”
c) Make a new (empty) playlist
d) Make sure the playlist pane is open on the right
e) Connect HTC as diskdrive
f) Search for all music on the drive in Windows Explorer
g) Select all music found
h) Right click and add to Windows Media Player playlist
i) In WMP – save playlist as
Filename: “Any_name.asx”
Remember to choose file type wpl, m3u, asx to get the format right
Export to the device to get the path right

Steps a-d+i in Windows Media Player (WMP) - e is chosen on the device and f-h in Windows explorer.

My use was to have my playlist shuffled while avoiding repeats - and that could be handled in WMP, but you could also choose the sequence manually or make any other sorting.

Note: some sources of error are: Saving the playlist on the PC will cause references to E:\Music\Song.wma (or whatever) which is likely to be different from the reference internally on the device (\Storage\Music\Song.wma or such).

I hope this helps - if nothing else; I feel a little better to have contributed in return for all the great advice found on the site.

I also investigated playlists created with Playlist Manager on the TouchPro, and to me it appeared that some had a conflicting structure, and would not read in HTC Audio Manager. I suspected the sequence of Title and other headings, but didn't investigate fully.

Regards, Anders