For anyone who listens to mp3’s streamed from the web and has iTunes streaming them for you, then you have probably encountered Apple’s M3U playlist issue. An M3U playlist is one of the “standard” playlist formats used to easily group or share a list of audio file links and most mainstream audio players can read and play them. I say most because the folks at iTunes have definately missed the boat and have completely botched the playing of the M3U.

Normally if you download a M3U playlist to your computer, your default player (ie. WinAmp, Window Media Player) will load it and then proceed to play each song in order. Apple’s iTunes on the other hand loads the links to the songs into your library, creates a mess, plays the first song, and proceeds to stop. Up until now the only work around for this was to save the M3U to your desktop and drag it to iTunes as a playlist directly. But thanks the folks over at itweaks.com, this issue is no more.

Enter M3U2iTunes. This little install program for MAC and Windows allows you to finally associate M3U playlists with iTunes and have them perform as expected; like a playlist.

M3U2iTunes simply creates a single playlist named “M3U Internet Stream” and places all songs from the downloaded m3u playlist into the M3U Internet Stream playlist.

M3U Internet Stream is always used as the target for m3u playlists. Rather than creating a new playlist each time, the M3U Internet Stream playlist is removed and recreated (so you won’t have a huge mess of new playlists in your iTunes libraries).

There is a Macintosh and a Windows version of M3U2iTunes. Each requires iTunes 4.5 or higher.

This makes me very happy and it works like a freakin charm. Download it and try it out on the next akaRaff Radio Drop.

Enjoy.