Making Motorola playlists (.pla files), part 1
I've got Motorola SLVR L7e mobile phone. The device is capable of playing MP3 audio files, and I use this feature occasionally.
Once a musical album is uploaded to phone's microSD, it is better to create playlist, otherwise playback will stop as soon as the first track finishes.
And while uploading albums is very simple (you just copy directories like you do with ordinary USB memory stick), creating playlists on L7e is pain.
You go to `Multimedia/Sounds' menu item, choose `New Playlist', then `Audio Files' and start selecting those belonging to your album. There are two inconveniences: 1) tracks are not sorted (i.e., you see the list of `03.Baz, and `01.Foo, and `02.Bar'), and 2) the list includes all the tracks stored on your memory card (and 1Gb flash may contain lots of them). Thus making a playlist is a laborious process of consulting track listing (from computer folder or wikipedia) and hunting tracks that are scattered over a huge list.
You think you've added files and you are done? Not so fast. You need to reorder them now. That's right, remember they were unsorted in the previous step. And here is Motorola playlist files' reordering procedure: choose playlist, select `Options' then `Reorder', go to track #1, select and pull it to the top, put it there; go to track #2, place it right after the first; repeat until it's time for pressing `Done'.
Phew!
But what a hell, none of human beings deserve being involved in such a stupid activity! What are these playlists?..
The result of suffering is a .pla file, stored in `mobile/audio' directory. The file is easy to see, copy, and delete, but it's not quite obvious how to create it -- the darn file is binary with format unknown.
Continued...