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I have an immediate interest that caused me to discover VLC Media Player. I'm wanting to use my Windows computer to manage audio files (principally music) that I intend to play on an Android device. I'm thinking this would mean to organize my media/audio files on the computer. For example a root folder named "MediaLibrary" with sub-folders containing the audio files and most notably playlists where I'm familiar with .m3u format. Then the idea would be to transfer the complete "MediaLibrary" folder structure to an sd-card that can be inserted into my Android device and played without having to do any of the organization work on the Android device. Most importantly the playlists need to work.

I've installed the portableapps version of VLC Media Played on thumb drive along with lots of other portable apps for Windows. I'd like the media library to reside on the thumb drive but that is NOT important. For testing the android version of VLC player has been placed on a Samsung Tab 10 tablet.

My first attempt at creating a playlist on the Windows computer (VLC portable) results in the Windows drive letter being included as part of the file name in the playlist (.m3u format). I don't expect that to work on an Android device.

If this idea of using one device to organize data for another is completely nuts then that's what I like to know before investing additional time trying to make this work. On the other hand if I simply need to learn more about VLC Player then some idea on how to make a playlist that uses a relative address for the files might be helpful.

Since file systems on Windows and Android are very different, I don't see how the same playlist could work on both systems.
Plus it seems that playlists created on Windows by VLC are using absolute paths:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 8&start=25

I've installed the portableapps version of VLC Media Played on thumb drive

FYI, since v3.x VLC can be made portable, no need to use a third party package anymore:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 65#p460965
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 84#p471984

Thanks for references. Appears as though others have somewhat related desires.

Yes, after spending a little more time it looks to me like there must be a fair amount of persistent data (that may be out of site and out of mind to the user) which is involved. The kind of stuff that Windows now refers to as APPDATA. Absent a very concerted effort to use storage methods that work across platforms (rather than APPDATA) my idea is NUTS.

Based on a very limited test it does look like this portable apps version does run properly when ported between machines where different drive letters are assigned. In my case the media (audio files only) are all stored on the same portable drive.

Another approach, for my nutty idea, could be to run the Android version of the APP on Windows. I believe this can be done with an emulator that, I think, is part of Android Studio for Windows. However, I suspect that while this will allow doing what I want on Windows using the VLC version that runs on Android there may not be any way to transfer what is working on Windows to an Android device. Any idea about that?

I also suspect this might be the wrong forum for such discussion. Might try asking in the Android forum.