

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.

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. In extended M3U, "#" also introduces extended M3U directives. The file can also include comments, prefaced by the "#" character.

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. Each song and its location has its own line. The m3u file is a metafile playlist that references mp3 files and provides additional metadata for the items in the playlist. 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. M3U ( Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator, MP3 URL) is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists.
