SYNC, M3U and Linux

SYNC, the voice-activated music and phone system in Ford cars, kept telling me that my M3U playlists were empty. They were generated by Amarok on Linux. It seems that SYNC does not accept the forward slashes / in these files, so you must change them to backslashes \ first. It also doesn't like %-encoded characters either; just use the literal characters, presumably in the encoding used for the actual filenames. However, it seems to be happy with LF line terminators, #EXTINF lines, and .. too.

Based on a StackExchange answer, you should be able to pipe an export from Amarok through Python:

cat from-amarok.m3u | python -c "import sys, urllib as ul; sys.stdout.write(ul.unquote_plus(l)) for l in sys.stdin" | tr '/' '\' > for-sync.m3u