M3U Playlists

Throughout the web, you will find music playlists in the M3U format.

This file format was originally implemented in Winamp and is now supported by many applications, including QuickTime Player and iTunes.

Safari, Firefox, iTunes and M3U Playlists

If you are on a Mac and web browsing with Safari or Firefox, chances are good that your browser is using iTunes as the default application for opening M3U playlists.

For better or worse, iTunes opens M3U playlists not as an iTunes playlist but as individual entries in your music library, listed within your music library by your current sorting preference. You can see which iTunes entries are streams contained in the M3U playlist: sort by the Kind column and look for “MPEG audio stream”.

This default iTunes behavior is not always desirable. Fortunately there are a couple of solutions:

Manually Creating M3U Playlists in iTunes

One solution requires several manual steps:

• From Safari or Firefox, “Download Linked File” or “Save Link As…” and you will now have the M3U playlist on your Mac.
• Next, drag the M3U playlist to your iTunes playlists.
• This will add a new playlist to iTunes and now you can listen to the playlist as iTunes fetches the music via the internet.

Open M3U Playlists in QuickTime Player

Another solution is to “Copy Link” or “Copy Link Location” from Safari or Firefox and then from QuickTime Player “Open URL…” with the M3U location.

A Better Solution - M3U2iTunes

Probably the best solution is to use the handy M3U2iTunes application.

M3U2iTunes is a helper application which creates an iTunes playlist containing the songs from the M3U playlist. Also, it does this using a generic playlist so you will not have a bunch of new playlists in iTunes from every M3U playlist you open.

M3U2iTunes is easy to install and setup. There are instructions on the M3U2iTunes page. Highly recommended.