To my ear, music .wavs played through Audacity sound better than when they’re played through standard music players like VLB or Pot Player. Is there a way to configure Audacity so that it works like a music player?
I’d like to be able to click on an .m3u file in a folder with associated .wavs and have Audacity play all the .wav files in order without any input from me.
Thanks for any info.
Tom
No and No. Audacity isn’t a music player. It has to decompress files to large lossless formats so it can do its advanced editing.
Audacity can’t open M3U playlist files or anything else from servers.
Playlists of files already on your computer are a feature request but we are not very likely to do it.
Gale
Thanks for your reply. Please add me to the list of people requesting the playlists feature you mentioned.
Tom
To my ear, music .wavs played through Audacity sound better than when they’re played through standard music players like VLB or Pot Player.
That shouldn’t be the case unless there is some equalizer or some other “enhancement” in the player software that’s changing the sound.
All the player software has to do is send the audio data to the soundcard (to the driver, actually).
…players like VLB or Pot Player.
I assume you mean VLC? VLC’s volume control can actually go over 100% and that can intoduce clipping (distortion) if the file is normalized/maximized. I don’t use pot. 
I almost forgot there is a List of Files feature for playing files on your hard or external drives. You could set the LOF list up so that the “offset” placed each subsequent file after the end of the previous one.
But it would be a fair amount of work to set up unless you wanted to play the list very often.
There is another partial solution using a Nyquist plug-in to import files end-to-end from a folder, but it requires WAV files and uses a lot of memory to import the files. See: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/append-import/20421/1 and http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Download_Nyquist_Plug-ins#install .
Gale
I think the rationale for why some people think Audacity playback sounds better could be if they are playing quietly. Audacity could benefit from a better signal to noise ratio than a software slider that was scaling down the master slider set very high.
But there are plenty of people who want Audacity to just scale the master playback slider without moving it.
Gale