iTunes tweak of the day - M3U2iTunes
One of the simplest ways to publish a playlist is in m3u
format. This is just a list of files or URLS to mp3 files.
Almost all music players support them. However, iTunes makes a
botch of it. If you play an m3u file in iTunes, it loads the links
to the songs, and then just tosses them into the main library list,
plays the first song and then then plays the next song in your library,
instead of the next song in the m3u playlist. In iTunes, M3Us
become unusable. To deal with this, there's M3U2Itunes,
a freeware helper application that fixes these problems.
M3U2iTunes simply creates a single playlist named "M3U Internet
Stream" and places all songs from the downloaded m3u playlist into
the M3U Internet Stream playlist, and plays the playlist. It
cleans up nicely after itself too, so you don't end up with hundreds of
playlists in iTunes. The program is easy to install, with good
instructions showing how to make finder and Safari use it instead of the
default iTunes behavior. M3U2iTunes is a good app to have.