Playlist won't play - VLC is unable to open the MRL - solution to this

[ram_girl]

"Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'file://<path>' . Check the log for details. "

I had a second hard drive, D, and had stored all my music there, created quite a few VLC playlists too. However, had to remove the D drive. So I then transferred all my music to a USB drive, drive F. But when I tried to click on any playlists in my music folder on drive F, they wouldn't play, got the error stated above.

Granted I suppose just renaming my usb F drive would work too, but I found another solution I wanted to mention (and definitely works, listening to my playlist right now as I write this).

For example 'playlist1.xspf' - open the file with Notepad++ or any other IDE/programming editor of your choice. And then, looks like the playlist file is an xml file, and then simply edit the file location of each song on the playlist to match your current music folder location.

<trackList>
<track>
<location>file:///D:/Music/...path.../name.mp3</location>
<image>file:///D:/Music/..path.../Folder.jpg</image>
<duration>208560</duration>
<extension application="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/playlist/0">
<vlc:id>0</vlc:id>
</extension>
</track>
...

Change to:

<trackList>
<track>
<location>file:///F:/Music/...path.../name.mp3</location>
<image>file:///F:/Music/...path.../Folder.jpg</image>
<duration>208560</duration>
<extension application="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/playlist/0">
<vlc:id>0</vlc:id>
</extension>
</track>
...


Use a find and replace method for the quickest manner to fix this.

Sorry if this solution has already been posted on this forum before (I didn't search here), but just wanted to get it out there, so folks doing a google search could find it easier - my own google search came up empty handed, so I just decided to open the playlist, check it out for myself.