Creating and Deleating SqView Playlists on Android Phones

I recently acquired a Samsung S8+ smart phone and decided to put my square dance music on it as a backup music source. I downloaded the SqView app and loaded my music on to the phone. I then tried to create some playlists for my music. As far as I can tell, the SqView app does not provide a tool to create playlists as the desktop and tablet versions do. So the question was, how do you create playlists on Android phones?

As I later found out from Thomas, SqView finds its playlists by asking the Android system to provide the list of playlists it knows about, all files ending in the .M3u suffix, and presents that list to users when they click the playlist option in the app. This means that any playlist, created by any app that can create Android playlists, will be shown. Thus the problem becomes how do you create a .M3u file on an Android phone.

Creating a playlist file

A .M3u file is a plain text file that specifies the locations of one or more media files, in our case .mp3 files. The playlist file is saved with the ".m3u" filename extension. Within the file, the paths to the media files are placed one path per line. You can create such a file in several ways.

1. Open a blank notepad document and either type the file path, or copy and paste the file path for each song, on a seperate line. Then save the file with a .M3u suffix instead of the .txt suffix in the same directory as the music. If you accidentally save it as a .txt suffix just change it to .M3u .
2. Find an app that allows you to create playlists and use it to create your playlist.
3. If you are on a network, and can access your music on your android phone (or tablet) remotely, you can use the SqView Playlist tool on your PC and point it at the phones music file (across the network) and then save the playlist in a directory on the phone again using the network connection. You must point the playlist tool at the remote directory because SqView playlist tool puts the whole directory path in the playlist file and playlists created by the tool on one computer will probably fail if just sent to a different computer (or phone) which has a different file structure.

Deleting a playlist

When you click the playlist option in the app, SqView will show you all the playlist files on your Android device. There is not a way to selectively show only the playlists you use for square dances. The only way to not see a playlist is to delete it. Usually this is as simple as finding the playlist file in your file system (use whatever tool you have that deletes files which is usually provided by the maker of the phone) and deleting it. Sometimes, however, you will not be able to find the file because your phone is not set up to show .M3u files (it only shows documents, music, videos, etc.). Even if you look in a directory asking the system to show you all the files it may not show you ALL the .M3u files. In this case you must find them by doing a search (using the search field) for ".m3u" but leave off the quotes . This will show you all the files that end with the .m3u suffix. At this point some apps that let you look at your files will let you delete the files you want to delete and some won't, especially if they have no content.

At one point I had created some .M3u files that had no content. The files showed up in the SqView list of playlists, but when you clicked on them, SqView just blinked. That was because the file was not found. (It would have been nice if SqView had given an error message saying that the file could not be found.) Anyway, I wanted to get rid of them because it made the playlist list extra long. The Samsung app that showed me files did not show .m3u files. It did show me the files when I did a .m3u search but it would not let me delete them because the "file was not found". Finally I downloaded the Google Files app, did the same search, found the same files, and this app let me delete the files. Thus they no longer showed up in the SqView list of playlists.

Hopefully this article has answered some questions you had about SqView playlists for Android phones. If you have further questions about this procedure, or have suggestions on how to make this document better, please email me (see below).