[asteele-xr6]

OK, I have been able to answer my own question, and it all works great.
I found numerous articles on other forums and have found what eventually worked great for me.


For Sync3 the requirement is to create two folders on the USB

Music
Playlists

Your Music goes under Music, and its perfectly fine to have a sub-directory for the artist, and then sub-directories under the artist for each album name.

Your playlist files need to go into the Playlist directory - but just the small playlists go here, you do not copy your actual media files into this directory.


Using iTunes, I selected an existing playlist and then clicked on [File], [Library], [Export Playlist] and selected an export type of M3U (note not the default export type of txt).


I then had to edit the M3U file with notepad, so as to correct the file location of where each media file lives, to be ..\Music rather than c:\media\music.... which is where my music files are stored on my PC. You can use the "replace with" function in notepad to instantly strip out the unwanted text.

The resulting file looks something like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:234,Castellorizon - David Gilmour
..\Music\David Gilmour\On An Island\01 Castellorizon.mp3
#EXTINF:407,On An Island - David Gilmour
..\Music\David Gilmour\On An Island\02 On An Island.mp3
#EXTINF:326,The Blue - David Gilmour
..\Music\David Gilmour\On An Island\03 The Blue.mp3


I have about 35GB of music, which is about 8,000 tracks - my car needed about 5 minutes to "index" what was on the USB, and then it was all working great.


I hope this helps someone