How to make playlists on the SanDisk Clip Sport on Linux

published: 2019-08-13

Make a playlist with the songs you want in VLC.
Save said playlist as an .m3u file. (Other playlist file types will not work.)
Make a copy of said playlist file. Open it up in a text editor of your choice.
Remove all the lines that start with "#EXTINF".
Using the find-replace function, change the following strings:

Whatever the path to your main music folder on your computer is, starting with "file:///", to "\Music". For example, the path to my main music library is file:///mnt/Hell3/Music/Music Archive/Popular. (My music is sorted into "Popular", "Soundtrack", and "Vaporwave".)

"%20" to " " (that is, a space).

"/" to "\".

Change the end-of-line markers to the DOS/Windows version.

Open a terminal and cd to the directory you saved the copy of your playlist in, then type the following:

unix2dos playlist-copy.m3u

Plug in your Clip Sport player. Make sure it is mounted properly (ie. not as a read-only device) before proceeding.
Copy the playlist you just converted in step 6 to the "Playlists" folder, and your music to the "Music" folder.