I don't use Windows or OSX (or even Linux) and don't have software capable of creating M3U playlists. I read about M3U format and tried to manually create a playlist in a text editor, but it doesn't work. I read that the Sansa Clip expects paths to be in Windows format with backslash and need Windows linefeed to work properly. There must be something else in the format I'm missing.
All I need is for somebody to post a piece of a playlist known to work in the Sansa Clip+ so I can see what I'm missing.
First thing is first, check your firmware and make sure you have the latest.
I checked and relative paths are working for me. For instance, in a given directory, I can just make a text file with .m3u extension that contains a list of the songs I want to play and it works:
aaron@ant:/media/0123-4567/MUSIC/Contrived - Pursuit Of Plots$ for f in * ; do echo $f >> contrivedplaylist.m3u;done &&cat contrivedplaylist.m3u
01 - Contrived - Concentric.mp3
02 - Contrived - Expletive Deleted.mp3
03 - Contrived - Ultimatum.mp3
04 - Contrived - For Matt.mp3
05 - Contrived - Get To Your Stations.mp3
06 - Contrived - This Is It.mp3
07 - Contrived - A Reason To Live.mp3
08 - Contrived - Silhouette.mp3
aaron@ant:/media/0123-4567/MUSIC/Contrived - Pursuit Of Plots$
Where the root of the device is "/media/0123-4567/" and "MUSIC" is one of the main directories on the root of the clip+.
when you unmount the device it will rescan and pick up this playlist, and it works. Other than that though, this method is pretty ****ing useless, as it does the same thing as browsing to a given directory and playing those songs (it doesnt allow for artist shuffled lists unless your directory is a huge collection of random songs in the first place).
However, I have had luck moving the playlist up a directory, so it resides in the parent and appending a relative path (windows '\', not POSIX '/', path standard). So the playlist resides in "MUSIC" and looks like:
Contrived - Pursuit Of Plots\01 - Contrived - Concentric.mp3
Contrived - Pursuit Of Plots\02 - Contrived - Expletive Deleted.mp3
so on and so forth...
hope that helps.