M3U

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M3U
File name extension	`.m3u`
Internet media type	`audio/x-mpegurl`
Developed by	Nullsoft
Type of format	Playlist

M3U (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator, MP3 URL) is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It was originally implemented in Winamp, although it is now supported by many applications.

An M3U file is a plain text file that contains the locations of one or more media files that the mediaplayer should play. Each location is placed on a new line. The locations can be either absolute or relative local pathnames (e.g., "C:\My Music\Chanson.mp3" or "Chanson.mp3") or they can be URLs. The file can also include comments, prefaced by the "#" character. In extended M3U, "#" also introduces extended M3U directives.

One common use of the M3U file format is creating a playlist file that contains a single entry pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and can be used for things like downloading from a website or for emailing, or for Internet radio listening.

The file is saved with the "M3U" or "m3u" filename extension.

"m3u" files use the Latin-1 charset, the unicode version of "m3u" is "m3u8", it can include UTF-8 unicode characters.

[edit] Compare with

Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX)
PLS (file format)
XSPF
B4S (file format) Winamp3 XML based playlist format

[edit] Example

Here is an example of an extended M3U file. Sample.mp3 and Example.ogg are the mediafiles. 123 and 321 are the lengths by seconds. A length of -1 may be used when the media file is a streaming file, as there is no predefined actual length value possible. The value after the length is the title to be shown, which is generally the same as the location of the file which is on the second line.

#EXTM3U

#EXTINF:123,Sample title
C:\Documents and Settings\I\My Music\Sample.mp3

#EXTINF:321,Example title
C:\Documents and Settings\I\My Music\Greatest Hits\Example.ogg

This example shows how to create an m3u file linking to a specified folder (Flash drive, CD-ROM, for example). The m3u file should contain only one string: the path to the folder. After starting up, the media player will play all contents of the folder: