This is way cool. It took me nearly an hour to compile the festival stuff, but amazingly it worked without much of any hacking. I added a little subroutine to pull in playlists from .m3u files (which are basically lists of paths to files). Here's the idea...

my @playlist;
if ($ARGV[0] =~ /\.m3u$/i) {
        @playlist = fill_playlist($ARGV[0]);
} elsif( @ARGV ) {
   @playlist = @ARGV;
} else {
   say_error( "No playlist given. Please select some songs for me to p
+lay!" );
}

sub fill_playlist {

   my $playlist = shift;
   my @return;
   if (-r $playlist) {
        open(LIST,"<$playlist") or die "couldn't open $playlist: $!";
        while(<LIST>) {
                next if /^#/;
                chomp;
                push @return, $_;
        }
        close(LIST);
   } else {
        say_error( "There was a problem accessing this playlist. Pleas
+e select some songs for me to play!" );
        exit;
   }

  return @return;
}
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