Playlist (m3u) not played when on external sdcard and crashes

[BQ X5]

First off, this is an awesome app. Using it for video and audio for many years. Thank you very much for the development!
Recently, I updated my phone and moved my music with playlists to my external sd card.
First, I had the music with playlists etc on the internal storage and all played fine. Then I had to update the memory with a bigger SD card and moved all to the external SD card. Sadly, VLC then can not play my playlists anymore.
They are recognized and read in VLC, but all containing songs in them can not be played.

Playlists were created in a PC environment, paths are as they should be "Music\Jazz\Song.mp3" no "C:// etc."

Tried setting locale to /mnt and /storage, as well as /storage/sdcard1/Music (the true path for the files). But VLC crashes and is unable to start again.
Tried to create a new playlist inside VLC and that works, but is stored hidden and not accessible to view its path contents...

The same playlists are played without any problem by Google music play App on my Cyanogen12.1, Android 5 phone. So it is not a problem of the playlists paths.

Can you please help solve the problem? I had sent a few system crash logs separately too.

Thank you in advance.

[alpep]

hello, if this can help, I had a "same" issue when I first wanted to use
an .m3u playlist file, trying to specify relative addressing with files located on
an external SD card.
VLC or Androïd (I'm not sure) appens the SD card path
/storage/extSdCard/ to the relative address so that if you specify
../Jazz/song3.mp3 in the playlist, it will fail to look for /storage/extSdCard/Music/../Jazz/song3.mp3
(Assuming, your playlist file is located in the Music root directory.)
It works fine when I simply specify Jazz/song3.mp3 in the .m3u file
This means that you need to use a tree with the playlist located in the tree root (Music) an specify the path
in that tree.

[AzraelDD]

Hello everyone,

I had the same issue as BQ X5 as well, but after reading here I finally came to a solution (though a different one than alpep):

My playlists were created on Windows with mp3tag (tried VLC as well). Therefore they naturally contained Windows style paths
"album\01 song_name.mp3"
I realized that VLC on Android expects Linux style paths
"album/01 song_name.mp3"

I replaced the slashes in all my playlists, and now they are recognized by VLC. The only remaining issue is that VLC seems to have problems with very large playlists (one with 30 hours did not open properly: The music starts playing after a while, but I cannot access the play menu in the bottom of the screen - it is just blank white. Interestingly, it showed up after hitting the pause buttom in the notification pull down menu and then everything was fine).

Google Music is able to play both types of playlists... Would you guys consider it possible to add a setting to VLC to let the user define which type (Windows vs. Linux) of paths it should expect in playlists?

Greetings,
Azrael