Mp3tag doesn’t (yet?) have built-in support for playlists with files that have Unicode filenames.
Unfortunately, the ».m3u« playlist format was an »ad-hoc« creation by Nullsoft (the former Winamp people) a long time ago, and there are no official specs. Nevertheless, the general consensus nowadays seems to be that M3U only supports the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set while the (newer) ».m3u8« format supports UTF-8 encoding.
Many programs like Mp3tag will even silently try to convert UTF-encoded file paths to ISO-8859-1 (and fail), resulting in entries like:
#EXTINF:30,Alfred E. Moonbase - Test #08: HebRus / ????? / ???????
D:\Temp\Testdaten\MusicIP\Moonbase, Alfred E. - Test #08_ HebRus _ ????? _ ???????.mp3
(from my test case), which should have been:
#EXTINF:30,Alfred E. Moonbase - Test #08: HebRus / עברית / Русский
D:\Temp\Testdaten\MusicIP\Moonbase, Alfred E. - Test #08_ HebRus _ עברית _ Русский.mp3
Programs like iTunes, Winamp, foobar2000 and the like also tend to differentiate between ».m3u« and ».m3u8« playlists and simply skip any non-Latin-1 entries in ».m3u« files.
So for those of you who really need playlists that support UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding (for instance if you use Unicode filenames like above), here are two exports that do exactly that:
M3U8 Playlist, absolute file paths.mte
$filename(m3u8,utf-8)#EXTM3U
$loop(%_counter%)#EXTINF:%_length_seconds%,%artist% - %title%
%_path%
$loopend()
M3U8 Playlist, relative file paths.mte
$filename(m3u8,utf-8)#EXTM3U
$loop(%_counter%)#EXTINF:%_length_seconds%,%artist% - %title%
%_filename_rel%
$loopend()
These need to be copied to the folder %APPDATA%\Mp3tag\export</b> for Mp3tag to recognise. This is usually something like C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\Mp3tag\export</i>.
In Mp3tag, you can now sort and mark files however you wish, right-click on the selected items, select »Export…« and »M3U8 Playlist, absolute file paths« (or »M3U8 Playlist, relative file paths«). Then give the new playlist a name and save it. Presto!
The playlist will be saved as ".m3u8" format, with UTF-8 encoding.
Under File -> Options -> Export, you should probably select
[x] Write BOM
so programs like Mp3tag, Windows Editor and Winamp can easily detect the encoding.
At least on my system here, Mp3tag (v2.42c) can even read ".m3u8" files back correctly.