I spent an afternoon fooling with my 4.3 Boom with version 1.20.1 on my 2015 Ultra Classic and finally wrestled it into submission. I’ll note below the step-by-step process how I do it…and it’s easy!

First, gotta tell ya how dumb I can be. I was making trip after trip after trip back and forth between my basement “office” (which I share with the furnace) and my shop which is about 200 feet from the house. I'd try something and it wouldn't work. I'd go back to the house and work on it some more, then go to the shop again. Rinse and repeat. When I was almost done I complained to my wife that I had probably walked 2 miles trying to figure this out. She then replied, “Why didn’t you just take your laptop out to the shop and work with it there?”

Blink blink blink.

This is for Windows users. Mac users will have to do it some other way. Anyway, here goes.

1. Formatted my 128G USB 3.0 thumb drive to Fat32 with an allocation unit size of 4096. (Other values might work, but this is what I used.) Windows won’t format a drive larger than 32G with FAT32 so I used Guiformat…a very handy free program. Here is a link to download it.

2. Created a folder on the freshly formatted thumb drive and after much thought about what an appropriate name for the folder might be, I named it “music.” (Duh)

3. Copied all my mp3s to the “music” folder on the thumb drive. They can be individual mp3 files, or folders with files inside. Just make sure it is all in the “music” folder.

4. Downloaded Playlist Creator 3.6.2 at this link.

5. Installed and fired up Playlist Creator, then clicked on “Settings” at the top of the screen. In the Settings pop-up window (see screen shot below) click on "Playlist Details" and look for the “saving playlist entries” option…the second one down…and select “Absolute (e.g “C:\My Music/MySong.mp3”) in the drop-down menu. Click OK to go back to the main screen.



6. On the main screen in the very bottom box with the label “Name and type:” select the “M3u” option in the drop-down menu circled in red in the graphic below.



7. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the "music" folder on your thumb drive. Drag and drop all your desired music from the thumb drive to the main window in Playlist Creator. You can drag individual mp3s or folders with mp3s inside. Doesn't matter. Playlist Creator will populate the screen with all individual songs like in the picture below.



8. Click on the song files that you DO NOT WANT for a particular playlist. The tunes to be deleted will be highlighted. Right click on the screen and click on “remove selected items.” (Don’t accidentally click on “remove all items” because it will do just that…remove all the songs you dragged over, and if you have spent a lot of time selecting songs for a playlist you don’t want to have to do it again because you clicked on the wrong option.) Whatever is left on the screen is what will be in your playlist.



9. When you are happy with your selection you should go to the window that is second from the bottom of the screen labeled “save location.” Drill down and select the “music” folder on your thumb drive as the save destination. In my case the thumb drive is the “G” drive. Yours may be a different letter, of course.

10. Give your playlist a name in the very bottom window and then click on “Create Playlist” at the bottom right of the screen and let it cook. When it’s done look in the “music” folder on the thumb drive for an m3u file with the name you assigned.

To make another playlist you click on “new” at the top of the screen and click “yes” in the pop-up window. Drag your music files back into the main window of Playlist Creator and do it again.

Stick in in the radio and you’re ready to go.

Tip: If you have lots of mp3 files, but you are going to create a playlist with, oh…say Led Zeppelin songs only…there is no reason to drag all of your music to the Playlist Creator main screen. You’ll just have to highlight all those extraneous files and delete them. Instead, drag and drop only the Led Zeppelin files and work with them.
.

 

Huh...Great write-up. I'll have to play with it...

THANKS!

 

Dumb question.... what does a "playlist" get you that just copying all your MP3's to the drive get you?

 

I've got over 850 songs on my thumb drive. I've been wanting to do a few play list to categorize this cluster. Gonna give it a try. Thanks for the write up!

 

Let's say you have 1,000 songs on your drive. Without a playlist your player would play all 1,000 of them either in order or randomly, depending on what option you have selected. With a playlist you can select specific tunes to play while ignoring all the others. Maybe you want to listen only to certain Beatles tunes, so you make a playlist of the Beatles songs you like. Select that playlist on the Boom unit and that's all that it will play. Yeah, you could play by selecting the artist or album, but a playlist gives you even more control over what you play. Then make another playlist with instrumentals, or hard rock, or country. You can create as many playlists as you want. I have a bunch of playlists.

Black Keys all songs
Blue Cheer all songs
Current hard rock songs
Led Zeppelin all songs
Live songs
Misc rock songs
Oddball stuff
Psychotic Reaction
Vanilla Fudge all songs
ZZ Top all songs
40s big band tunes

(Psychotic Reaction is one of my favorite songs, and there are about 25 different bands that have recorded it! I have most of 'em)
.

 

removed


.

 

Could you give us a screen shot of the Boom screen to show how it displays the playlists??

 

 

Yup! Navigate to your USB, then to "FIND" on the upper left corner. Drop down and click on "PLAYLISTS" and this is what you'll see. I also created a short, but beautifully crafted [cough cough] video that shows it, too.

 

THANKS Frank! It works GREAT!! Thanks for the write-up, awesome tutorial...