AudioStick allows you to copy/synchronize .m3u/.m3u8 media playlists to an arbitrary directory (ex: external thumb drive). After synchronization, the resultant directory becomes a file-based playlist.

Copy all your music playlists to a single USB stick. You can then listen to your favourite music on any media-capable USB port:

• Your car's audio console.
• Your television's built-in media playback menu.
• Your favourite media player.
• Your video game console's media playback menu.

Although .m3u/.m3u8 playlists are fairly standard among computer media players, alot of consumer equipment does not yet support these files.

To circumvent this issue, AudioStick creates "filesystem-based playlists": Each playlist is organized in its own directory, and media files are copied one-by-one, using numbered prefixes to maintain track order.

Implementation details of file-based playlist:

• Filenames are prepended with each file's position in the playlist.
• Each playlist entry/"track" is copied to its own file
  (Adding a "track" twice in a playlist requires 2x the drive space of that "track").

AudioStick currently supports playlists of the following formats:

• M3U playlist (.m3u/.m3u8)

Simply right-click on the desired playlist file, and click on "Synchronize with AudioStick".

AudioStick synchronizes to iTunes playlists through intermediary .m3u files. The following steps demonstrate how one can export an iTunes 12 playlist to the required .m3u format:

1. In iTunes, open the desired playlist.
2. Under the File menu, select Library|Export List...
3. Choose output folder.
4. Specify playlist filename.
5. Set filetype to .m3u.
6. Click "Save".
7. Find newly created .m3u playlist using the Windows File Explorer.
8. Right-click on the playlist file.
9. Click on "Synchronize with AudioStick".

NOTE: The above process might need to be adapted for your particular version of iTunes.

To install AudioStick, you must first install a copy of the Julia programming language. Next, you simply follow a few steps to install AudioStick and register it to your Windows Explorer context menu.

1. Go to the Julia language download page http://julialang.org/downloads/.
2. Download one of the Windows Self-Extracting Archives (.exe). The 64-bit version is highly recommended, if supported by your operating system.
3. Launch the downloaded file to install Julia.

1. Lauch Julia.

2. Install source:
   julia> ]
pkg> add https://github.com/ma-laforge/AudioStick

3. Generate setup information file (.inf):
   julia> using AudioStick
julia> AudioStick.writeinf()

4. Note the current working directory (CWD):
   julia> pwd()

5. Install the AudioStick context menu from the auto-generated .inf file:

   1. In Windows Explorer, right-click on:
      [CWD]\AudioStick_AddWinExContextMenu.inf
   2. Click Install.

• AudioStick currently only works on Windows, but could probably be ported to other platforms with little effort.
• Duplicate tracks will each take up the entire memory space required by the original file. This is because most of the tested consumer audio equipment would only support FAT32 USB drives - and the FAT32 system does not support softlinks.

AudioStick has been tested using the following environment(s):

• Windows 10 / Julia v1.5.1