Converting MPD (or any .m3u) playlist to iTunes format

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:59:00 -0700

This is hyperspecific to my use case but maybe others will find this useful. I have several iPods that I sync from a Windows VM on my main Linux PC. My music library lives on the Linux host, managed with beets and mpd . Mpd playlists are standard .m3u files, i.e. a list of file paths, which iTunes can import, but the file paths are Linux file paths and are relative. I needed a way to convert each line from a relative Linux file path to an absolute Windows file path.

My music library /home/yequari/Music is mapped to Z:\ in the Windows VM, so for me it was just a matter of converting the Linux path to a Windows path and prepending the Z:\ root drive to it (e.g. Sleep/Dopesmoker/Dopesmoker.mp3 becomes Z:\Sleep\Dopesmoker\Dopesmoker.mp3 ). There’s probably some sed magic that could do this pretty easily, but I wrote a Python script to do it instead.

import ntpath
import argparse


def main(args: argparse.Namespace):
    infile = args.f
    outfile = args.o
    prefix = args.prefix
    for line in infile:
        # use ntpath since we're specifically writing out Windows paths
        relpath = ntpath.normpath(line)
        newpath = ntpath.join(prefix, relpath)
        print(newpath)
        outfile.write(f'{newpath}\n')


if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        prog='PlaylistAbs',
        description='Converts relative paths to absolute paths')
    parser.add_argument('prefix',
                        help='Absolute filepath to prepend to each entry')
    parser.add_argument('-f',
                        type=argparse.FileType('r'),
                        help='Playlist file')
    parser.add_argument('-o',
                        type=argparse.FileType('w'),
                        help='Output file')
    args = parser.parse_args()
    main(args)

Python on yequari.com

Converting MPD (or any .m3u) playlist to iTunes format