.M3U File

M3U (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator, MP3 URL) is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It was originally implemented in Winamp, although it is now supported by many applications, including VLC media player, XMMS, foobar2000, JuK, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, iTunes, QuickTime Player, Yahoo! Music Engine, JetAudio, RokuLabs SoundBridge, Spider Player, and PlayStation Portable.

The m3u file is a metafile playlist that references mp3 files and provides additional metadata for the items in the playlist. Each song and its location has its own line. The locations can be either absolute or relative local pathnames (e.g., "C:\My Music\Chanson.mp3" or "Chanson.mp3") or they can be URLs. The file can also include comments, prefaced by the "#" character. In extended M3U, "#" also introduces extended M3U directives.

One common use of the M3U file format is creating a playlist file that contains a single entry pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and can be used for things like downloading from a website or for emailing, or for Internet radio listening.

The unicode version of M3U format is M3U8 format, it can include UTF-8 unicode characters.

MIME types:
audio/x-mpegurl
audio/x-scpls
uadio/scpls

An m3u file extension is related to M3U (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator) playlist file format. It was originally implemented in Winamp, although it is now supported by many applications.

How to open:

Nowadays most media players should be able to handle *.m3u files.

How to convert:

Generic M3U playlists may be converted to a media player specific format. This is done with loading the *.m3u file and saving it to the new format in your media player.