Novus Convert
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Data format

M3U converter

An .m3u file is a playlist: an ordered list of media file paths or URLs, one per line, optionally annotated with #EXTINF lines carrying each track's duration and title. It contains no audio itself — only pointers to it.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop M3U files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where M3U comes from

M3U appeared with the Winamp and Fraunhofer MP3 players in the mid-1990s as the simplest thing that could work, and was never formally specified. The extended form with #EXTM3U and #EXTINF was a Winamp convention that everyone copied. Its encoding was historically the local system codepage, which is why .m3u8 was later introduced purely to signal UTF-8.

How M3U works

  • Plain lines are media references — relative paths, absolute paths or URLs — in playback order.
  • Lines beginning with # are comments; #EXTM3U marks the extended form and #EXTINF carries duration and title.
  • Relative paths resolve against the playlist's own location, so moving the file breaks it.
  • There is no specification, and encoding is implementation-defined, which is the format's central weakness.
  • The file carries no audio; it is a reference list and nothing else.

When to use M3U

  • Saving a local playlist from a media player
  • Ordering a set of audio files for burning or transfer
  • Sharing a sequence of stream URLs
  • Converting a legacy playlist to UTF-8 or to a structured format

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Trivially simple — readable and editable in any text editor
  • Supported by effectively every media player ever written
  • Tiny, since it stores references rather than media

Limitations

  • Unspecified encoding causes mojibake in non-ASCII track names
  • Relative paths break the moment the playlist moves
  • No metadata beyond an optional duration and title

Compatibility

Read by VLC, foobar2000, iTunes, Winamp and essentially every player and car stereo. The encoding ambiguity is the practical problem, not support. Novus Convert parses it locally and converts to M3U8 and JSON, which is the reliable way to force UTF-8 onto a legacy playlist.

Track references, and durations and titles where #EXTINF lines are present, are preserved. Nothing else exists in the format to carry.

Convert M3U to another format

Convert other formats to M3U