I posted on this topic on the Hellcat forum. This method used wpl playlists, but also works for m3u playlists. Hope this helps:
link:
https://www.hellcat.org/threads/uconnect-playlists-one-guys-journey.243621/
Here is a copy of the post, in case the link doesn't work:
I’ve been working on getting my music on a hard drive and connect to my 2016 Challenger SRT Hellcat UConnect system via USB. Along the way, I had a few problems and thought to post some of the things I’ve found and the setup that worked for me. I hope this can be of use for someone. My music resides on a Window 10 PC and so most of this post relates how to transfer the music from this system to the 2016 Hellcat UConnect system.
The hard drive I chose is a 2TB Western Digital (WD) My Passport Portable USB Hard Drive. Got it at Best Buy (Canada), here’s a link showing examples available today:
External-Hard-Drives-Examples . An important setup note for the hard drive is to format it using FAT32. I have not tried other formatting systems (NTFS or exFAT) available on the PC, but I had read previous posts that FAT32 is the way to go and it worked for me. Because the Windows 10 system doesn’t allow for FAT32 formatting, I used the MiniAide FAT32 Formatter from download.com,
MiniAide-Fat32-Formatter . This program, as the name implies will format your hard drive to FAT32, worked well for me. Connect your hard drive, install MiniAide FAT32 Formatter. Open the program, left click on the drive you want to format to highlight it, right click and pick “Format Partition”. You can add a Label to the partition (like “Music”), ensure you pick FAT32 as the file system. You also have cluster size choices, but I just used the default. Once you have clicked ok, click on the green check mark at the top of the menu to apply changes. Confirm yes to apply changes, you will then see progress bars for the formatting.
The hardware is now ready to transfer music to it. I read many blogs on these topics, some say that there are size limitations for the USB drives in the UConnect system. At this moment, I have a 2 TB drive in the car with 110 GB of music and it all gets read by the system nicely. The system does take a while to read it all, but it works.
As I am an old guy (54 yo), a lot of my music was on physical media, mostly CDs. I ripped all of this into mp3 (320 kbps) using Windows Media Player (WMP). Because of this, all of the formatting of the Music folders was based on WMP. I found that UConnect works well with the folder formatting from WMP. It picks up Artist & Album correctly. So, as far as the folder structure, it goes like this: C:\Users\username\Music\Artist\Album. If all of your music gets read correctly into WMP, then you are set to transfer over to the hard drive. With your newly formatted hard drive connected, copy all of the sub-folders under the Music folder on your PC to the hard drive. All of the music you have should then be readable into UConnect and well organized.
The hardware and songs were a pretty straightforward process to get to work with UConnect. I actually think the system is quite good and pretty robust in reading the files. I’ve had nightmares with other systems from other car manufacturers that will remain nameless here. However, I did get stuck for a long time with Playlists. I had to dig down and try many things to get these to work properly. Learned a few things along the way and thought to share in case someone else is tearing his/her hair out.
Over all the trials I did, I found that both the .m3u and .wpl formats for the Playlists will be read by the UConnect system. I will not talk about .m3u much because I ended up going with .wpl in the end. However, if you decide to go with .m3u, make sure to open your playlist and check that the paths to the mp3 files are correct, I used Notepad++ for this. In my case, I converted the .wpl I had to .m3u using WPLtoM3U Converter, available on download.com:
WPL-To-M3U-Converter . Make sure to use the following conventions to correctly define the path from where your .m3u resides in the folder structure to where the .mp3 resides
/ is the root of the current drive;
./ is the current directory;
../ is the parent of the current directory.
Now to .wpl playlists. These playlists were built on my PC in Windows Media Player (WMP). If you can play the playlists on your PC, they should work fine on the UConnect system (mostly, see later). Once you save the Playlist in WMP, they will by default reside in C:\Users\username\Music\Playlists\ . So, when you copy all of the sub-folder under \Music, the Playlists folder will be copied with it. The good news is UConnect, stalwart that it is, will read the Playlists without much of a problem.
However, and this is what took me so much time to figure out, the playlists are read, but in my case, there were some song omissions in the playlists, some of them just disappeared. If you selected this song in the folder structure in UConnect, it would play no problem, just wouldn’t play on playlist. I struggled with this for a long time. I re-formatted the hard drive completely, re-copied all files and playlists, still same problem. I tried .m3u as mentioned above, these playlists were read by UConnect but still had the song omissions. Using Notepad++, I looked at the playlist files for any omissions, saw nothing that would point to an issue, plus the playlists worked on the PC. Eventually, I had to detail all of the songs that were not being picked up in the playlists. So, here’s what I found and I was shocked, but it totally fixed the problem. In my folder system, the album and artist are folders. The playlists pointed to the exact spelling of these folders, but get this, IT IS CASE SENSITIVE. I am shocked by this because Windows paths are not case sensitive, but the playlist paths in UConnect are. So, when I used the exact case for the folders, the playlists were picked up perfectly. So, folks, if you want it all to work, make sure that the paths are EXACTLY copying the spelling, punctuation, special characters and CASE.
I hope you had fun reading my journey into UConnect. As I said, great system overall, just the quirk of case sensitivity on file paths. If you want a summary of setup, here goes:
- FAT32 formatted hard drive
- WMP folder structure
- WMP generated .wpl playlists
- Watch for path of playlists, they are case sensitive and must match exactly the folder spelling
