[soccerdad]

I finally got a chance to re-try auto-adding playlists again. I won't go through all the steps it took for me to figure out how the Zune software behaves, but I'm fairly sure that I understand what it's doing and that its behavior is deterministic.

The long-and-short of the story is that the software *will* monitor for playlists under the folder that's specified for ripping and downloading. This is true even if that folder is configured as a UNC folder on another server, e.g. \\server\Music. It will also monitor under a folder that's specified for monitoring music. In my case, they're the same - "\\server\Music". But if I added the original monitor music folder as another monitored folder, e.g. C:\Users\{userid}\Music\Zune, it will pick up playlists that are dropped there as well. A couple of points here: a) I only tested dropping .m3u and .zpl files into a folder named "Playlists" under those folders. It may find those file extensions anywhere under the monitored folders. b) It saves the resulting .zpl files into the "Playlists" folder under the configured rip/download folder. That seems to be true even if it's a .zpl file that it found in the monitored directory (i.e. it would be a duplicate of the first .zpl file).

The reason I had problems originally is that I was using existing .m3u files that I had from another application, and the iRiver player I used which consumed those .m3u files didn't need the various "#EXT???" lines in the .m3u files. All my .m3u files consisted solely of lines with file names / locations.

When I took your suggestion to create a file consisting of just the line "#EXTM3U", the Zune software dutifully added the empty playlist when I dropped it in a monitored folder. However, when I used a .m3u file with that initial line and only one more line consisting of a file name / path, the Zune software ignored it. Making a long story longer, I used WMP to create a .m3u file. That file had a line preceding each file name / path of the form "#EXTINF:0,{filename}.mp3 (where {filename} is just the filename portion of the full path). The Zune software accepted .m3u files with those extra lines. So it would seem that the Zune software needs a more fully-formed .m3u file, even if there are applications / players that might work fine with .m3u files containing just file names / paths.

Finally, while people likely already know this, a lot of the Zune settings can be found in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Zune. The various paths that are configured are in the "Groveler" key under that location. My one comment is that it might be nice if the "Playlists" paths (monitored and saved) could be explicitly configured separate from the "Music" paths, but now that I understand how it's working, it's not unreasonable.

Hope that helps someone somewhere...

Donnie