Relative path names inside m3u playlists : possible ?

[Andre Gosselin]

I have minimserver configured on a Win10 platform to read media files (contentDir) from the following absolute paths on a portable USB drive:
M:\mu\fla (holds .flac files)
M:\mu\dsd (holds .dsf files)
M:\mu\playlists (holds .m3u playlists)

Each of those directories can hold nested subdirectories.

A typical .m3u playlist reads as follows.

File full path name:

Quote:M:\mu\playlists\Composers\Abel, Carl Friedrich\Abel - The Drexel Manupscript - Pandolfo.m3u

File contents:

Quote:M:\mu\fla\Pandolfo, Paolo\Abel- The Drexel Manuscript\01 Abel- The Drexel Manuscript - Suite in D major -1. Prélude.flac
M:\mu\fla\Pandolfo, Paolo\Abel- The Drexel Manuscript\02 Abel- The Drexel Manuscript - Suite in D major -2. Allegro.flac
...

This setup allows access to the playlists by browsing the minimserver [folder view]. Everything works flawlessly.

The problem I have is when the portable drive is moved to another machine with minimserver installed, resulting in a change in the prefix of the absolute path leading to the directories. If the new machine is a Windows one, the drive letter assiged to the portable drive will likely change (eg from M: to G: ). If the new machine is running Linux, the drive will be mounted under a subdirectory directory of the Linux file system (eg /mnt/something).

The minimserver contentDir config can easily be edited to accomodate those changes. However, the contents of the .m3u playlists will become unaccessible to minimserver, because the path names point to a now invalid location (eg M:\mu\fla\... is invalid if the portable drive is assigned G: on windows).

The contents of the playlists could of course be edited to substitute the good path prefix, but if the number of playlists is high (> 15,000 in my case), this can quickly become troublesome. This also requires to maintain different versions of the playlists, eg one for G: on windows, possibly also H: , etc). I would greatly prefer to change the pathnames inside my playlists once and for all so as to make them immune to a change of drive letter or mount point. I am thinking here of the possibility to use relative path names inside .m3u plalists.

On Windows, I found that the drive letter can be omitted. In the example above, I can write:

Quote:\mu\fla\Pandolfo, Paolo\Abel- The Drexel Manuscript\01 Abel- The Drexel Manuscript - Suite in D major -1. Prélude.flac
\mu\fla\Pandolfo, Paolo\Abel- The Drexel Manuscript\02 Abel- The Drexel Manuscript - Suite in D major -2. Allegro.flac
...

I found that by trial and error, and I do not know if this is specific to my setup or not.

I did not try on Linux. In this invironment, I also suspect the possibility of problems arising from the use of backslashes inside path names on Windows names.

Could it be possible to get some advice on how to make .m3u contents somewhat immune to a change of drive letter on Windows, or mount point on Linux ? Is there an easy solution to this problem, like a possible config in minimserver to specify a prefix to transform relative path names into absolute ones ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.