Changing iTunes playlists to Winamp playlists in less than 100 easy steps.

Since going with Android for my tablet & phone I've no use for iTunes any more. After a run at Foobar2000 I have returned to Winamp for music management. Winamp lacks a lot in the playlist area and does not appear to be on any track to improvement. Windows Media Player? No thanks, please keep my files clean without conversions, ghost library sharing and whatever copy protection MS wants me to comply with. VLC?  Nothing there that I could find. Here's the way I deconstructed the playlists to work for me.

Right click on the playlist name, click export

Save as M3U file

Here's the resulting M3U file

Try and bring it straight into Winamp and the EXTINF information takes over and puts the title at the beginning. Frustrating to edit, even with the list sorted by artist since the song still begins with the title. Winamp does not yet break out the title, artist etc into separate columns.

M3U files are just a text file of the full path to the files. Exported from iTunes, there is a line for the path & filename and another line for the "EXTINF". What I need is to either change or strip out the lines that make it display Title/Artist.

Change the file extension to txt. Confirm this for Windows.

Here is the file straight out of iTunes. Every song shows the EXTINF with the offending Title/Artist format. If the playlist is short I could just delete the #EXTINF lines. But this one has some 9,000 songs.

Searching for a conversion utility didn't work for me. I tried importing the iTunes list to VLC, Windows Media Player, and just about every application I had. None would strip out the EXTINF lines for me. So for a converter I'll use what I have. Excel. Open the text file with Excel..

Excel starts the text file import process, I left it as "delimited" and hit finish. You may want to paw through the process and make sure Excel does not separate the lines into columns.

Sort A to Z. Excel, it's magic.

All the EXTINF lines begin with a # so they can be selected and deleted in one swoop. Click the disk to save the file as is. Excel will warn you that it's a text file, say "Nah". You are left with a text file full of path & filenames.*

Rename it back to an M3U file

Drag the M3U file into Winamp's playlist window.

The end result, and easy to sort & search playlist in good ol' Winamp.

If there is an easier way, I'll pass it along. I no longer build playlists with iTunes so all of my lists are now clean.

* Can also take this a step further to find duplicates and delete them while you are here.