1001 playlist questions… (maybe not quite that many)…

I’m greatly confused about the issue of playlists on Firefly. I’ve read everything I could find on the forums, and nothing I found cleared up any of my confusion…

In case there are any functional differences in running Firefly on different hardware, my server is running on an Infrant ReadyNAS, which I am serving to a Soundbridge Radio. On the NAS, I have Firefly svn-1676 serving a vast collection of mp3’s. Since the NAS had come initially with a greatly antiquated version of Firefly (which wasn’t too useful), I’ve also got the UPNP media server enabled. It behaves differently than Firefly, so I’ve left it running, since the Soundbridge Radio just treats it as a different device.

Having the NAS/media server capability — and having previously just served mp3’s off of network file system shares — I’m trying to figure out a “best practices” scenario for arranging my system and deploying files.

In reading about Firefly and m3u playlists, I’ve seen a lot of posts about making relative playlists and storing them in the same directory with the files referenced in the list. That’s all well and good — I think — except for the fact that I can’t figure out how to find the playlists in the Soundbridge Radio interface. Browsing the Firefly server, when I look at “Playlists”, that seems to only show me the smart playlists that I created in Firefly’s web interface. What I would have thought the obvious selection — “Browse” — will only let me browse by elements in the mp3 tags (title, artist, etc.). I haven’t seen anything that will let me navigate the underlying file system to even SEE m3u playlists if they were in the same directory as files. (I did enable m3u as a filetype in the Firefly config, though I’m not sure that it “took” exactly, since I also changed the server name and it still appears as “Itunes Server” in the SBR control panel.)

So at this point, I have no idea where to even look. My general assumption is that this sort of thing should be intuitive (and obvious), but every place I’ve looked so far hasn’t gotten me any further along…

Any help is greatly apprectiated!