Python Script for m3u-Playlist-Creation in Linux, macOS and Windows

Background

Recently I needed to write a script to create some m3u-playlists for my private Liquidsoap radio stream (i highly recommend checking their project out, it's amazing) and I figured I may as well upload a slightly polished version of it.

Features

This script can be used to create music/video playlists on Linux, macOS and Windows with ease. It parses all subdirectories of a given directory (unless exclusions are set) and filters only for file types specified by the user. It offers additional options to remove duplicates and choose between absolute and relative paths.

Usage

Commandline Options:

Option	Default	Description
-n	'playlist.m3u'	The name of the playlist file, change it to your liking, but you need to keep the extension as is (.m3u).
-m	'w'	The mode python writes the playlist file in, the default, 'w' will overwrite existing files, use 'a' to append them instead.
-c	'utf-8'	Codec used by python when writing a file. Refer to the Standard Encodings section of the official docs for reference if you run into problems.
-s	os.getcwd()	This searches the current working directory . I recommend setting an absolute path to your music directory or subfolder instead.
-e	''	Specifies the subdirectories that are not included in the playlist. (refer to the Examples for usage information)
-d	False	If set to True this script will prevent duplicate entries in your playlist by only adding the first path found. (useful if the same tracks reside in multiple subfolders for some reason)
-a	True	If set to False this will result in your playlist containing paths relative to your current working directory. I advise keeping the default.
-f	'.mp3 .flac .wav .aac'	Those are the formats the script will write into the playlist.

Examples

Linux and MacOS

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python3 m3u.py

This runs the script with the default options, to be successful this requires the start of the script from inside your music library.

python3 m3u.py -n 'my-playlist.m3u' -s '/path/to/my/music' -d True

And that will result in a playlist called 'my-playlist.m3u' containing all the default music file formats from 'path/to/my/music' and all subdirectories without duplicates.

python3 m3u.py -n 'my-playlist.m3u' -m 'a' -s '/path/to/my/music' -d True -f '.mp3 .flac'

This command is similar to the one before, except it will not overwrite the existing file and only appends it by mp3 and flac files.

python3 m3u.py -s '/path/to/my/music/Rock' -e 'Celtic Classic Gothic'

Lastly, that command will include all Rock songs except those from the subdirectories: Celtic, Classic and Gothic.

Windows

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The only thing that should differ is the way python is called (for my system that's py or python, the rest should be similar.

A command could look like this:

py m3u.py -n 'my-playlist.m3u' -s 'C:/path/to/my/music/Rock' -d True -f '.mp3 .flac'

Note

• The playlist file is always created in the current working directory (that's where the script is run from).
• -d if set to True can result in unwanted behaviour if files from different folders have the same names but are not actually the same song. I recommend leaving this off, unless you know you got a lot of actual duplicates and the names are descriptive enough (e.g.: Title - Genre - Interpret - ... .mp3) to render false positives unlikely.
• So far, this script has only been tested in Linux, MacOS and Windows, but it could work on other Unix(-like) operating systems as well.