M3U Files: How to Play or Download the Contents of an M3U Playlist
If you have ever downloaded an M3U file thinking you were going to get a song, audio file, or podcast, you’ve probably noticed the file size is tiny, and the m3u doesn’t really do anything on it’s own. This leads many users to wonder how to play the audio file, or how to convert that m3u into an mp3, m4a, or turn it into another familiar audio format. M3u’s are fairly misunderstood in that sense, they’re actually just a plain text playlist container file that is either a local playlist of audio, or a simple URL (link) to the actual audio content, usually intended to play as an audio stream.
Playing the audio from an m3u is made easy with iTunes, but perhaps more useful is getting the actual audio files out of an m3u container by downloading the source audio to a local hard drive. We’ll cover how to do both.
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