5.9 Playlists

A playlist is a list of songs that you've decided should go together. It can be made up of pretty much any group of songs arranged in any order. For example, if you're having a party, you can make a playlist from the current Top 40 and dance music in your music library.

Unlike the tedious , afternoon-consuming way of making a mix album in the Olden Days of vinyl, cassettes, and a stopwatch, MP3 playlists are a cinch to set up. Once you've got 'em, you can save your playlists, download them to your iPod, or even burn them to CDs for posterity.

5.9.1 Making a New Playlist

The Playlist window at the upper-right corner of the MusicMatch screen (Figure 5-16) is your workspace for making and mixing playlists. (If some technically challenged miscreant accidentally closed it when you weren't around, choose View Playlist.) The Playlist window tucks itself behind the main MusicMatch Control panel, but leaves a vertical sign reading PLAYLIST on the edge that you can click to slide it out.

Figure 5-16. You can make a playlist from anything you can drag into the Playlist window ”like the song being dragged here. The buttons at the bottom let you Open previously created playlists, Save your new creations, Clear the songs out of a playlist window, Burn the playlist to a CD, Shuffle the play order, Repeat the playlist over after the last track is finished, and Send the Playlist to an external device, like an iPod. The three buttons at the top of the window indicate the source of the songs in the playlist ”from audio files, streaming radio, or a CD.

Once you have your Playlist window open, you're all ready to make a playlist. If there are song titles still in the window from the last time you used the program, click the Clear button just below the window to wipe the slate clean.

To add songs to this window, start in the My Library window. Double-click each tune you'd like to add to your new playlist. You can also drag individual tracks ”or groups of them ”onto the playlist window, as shown in Figure 5-16.

To make a playlist from the entire contents of albums or collected artists ' works, use any of these tactics:

• Drag album titles or performer names from the first column (Folder View) up to the Playlist window.

• Right-click a track and then, from the shortcut menu, choose the Add Track(s) to Playlist option.

• Drag sound files directly from your desktop or folder windows into the Playlist window. (Note, however, that these songs don't get automatically added to the library unless you change your preferences. To do so, choose Options Settings; click the General tab; then, where it says "When double-clicking local music files," turn on "Add to Music Library.")

Don't worry about clogging up your hard drive. When you add a song title to a playlist, you don't copy the song; you're just giving MusicMatch instructions about which tracks to play and where to find the files. In essence, you're creating file shortcuts of the originals . You can have the same song on several different playlists without having to worry that you've now got sixteen copies of "Convoy" by C.W. McCall.

Once you have that new playlist just the way you want it, click the round Save button at the bottom of the Playlist window. A dialog box asks you what you'd like to call this new playlist.

NOTE

After you've created new playlists, don't move your original music files and folders around on the hard drive. The Playlists feature uses the file paths and locations of the music files when you originally saved the playlist, so moving the original files will result in having to redo your playlists.

Once you've saved and stored some playlists, you can call one up again by clicking Open at the bottom of the Playlist window. When the Open Music box pops up, click the icon for Playlists, click the playlist you want, and click the Play button within the Open Music box to start the music.

5.9.2 Modifying a Playlist

To reopen a playlist so you can add to it, shorten it, or rearrange the songs in it, proceed like this:

1. Open the Playlist window.

   If it's not onscreen, go to View Playlist, or click the triangle on the edge of the MusicMatch control panel window to slide open the Playlist window.

2. Click the Playlists icon on the left side of the box, and then click the name of the playlist you want to edit.

   It looks like a folder with an .m3u file extension.

3. Click Play to load the tracks into the Playlist window, where you can work on them.

   Now you can drag the song titles up or down within the playlist window to reorder them, drag new songs into the window, delete songs by selecting them and then pressing the Delete key, and so on, until you're happy.

4. Click Save.

   You can give the modified playlist a new name if you like. To retain the old name, click Yes when MusicMatch Jukebox asks if you want to replace the older version.

5.9.3 Deleting a Playlist

You can delete a playlist, but you'd never guess how.

Start by opening the Playlist dialog box. Then, believe it or not, you're supposed to click the playlist name and click Save. In the Save Playlist box, click the name of the one you want to delete and then click Delete (Figure 5-17). The playlist disappears from your collection.

Figure 5-17. The Save box also holds the key to deleting playlists, which isn't exactly the most intuitive thing in the world, but it works.

Click the red X in the top-right corner to close the dialog box (your other options are Save, Cancel, and Delete, none of which are good for making the escape).

5.9.4 AutoDJ Playlists

Computers have automated many a time-consuming mission, and making playlists is no exception. With its AutoDJ feature, MusicMatch Jukebox Plus can compose its own playlists that appeal to your personal tastes. You just have to tell it what your personal tastes are for the playlist at hand.

For example, you might tell one AutoDJ Playlist to assemble a two- hour set of songs from your immense jazz collection ”but only tracks by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, and Duke Ellington. Doing it the AutoDJ way lets you spend less time picking through your library to find songs that match your mood, meaning you can get on with the music that much faster.

To get started, click the AutoDJ button at the top of the My Library window (or choose Options Playlist AutoDJ). As you can see in Figure 5-18, the AutoDJ dialog box asks for your input on the amount of time you want the playlist to last and what kind of music you want on it.

Figure 5-18. The AutoDJ automatically generates a playlist with the guidelines you provide. Just pick the amount of time you want the playlist to last and then add criteria like albums, artists, or genres. This AutoDJ production, for example, will snag two hours of tunes by selected artists in the Jazz genre . You can give the AutoDJ up to three sets of criteria.

You can get a sneak peek at the computer-generated playlist by clicking Preview. A list of tracks appears in the Preview window. If you like what you see, click the Get Tracks button to sweep all the tunes into the Playlist window.

If you like the AutoDJ playlist enough to transfer it to your iPod the next time you synchronize it, click Save.

NOTE

The more information you've added to your track tags during your music-organizing activities, the more detailed and precise you can get when formulating an AutoDJ playlist. What you've done is give yourself more elements to use in the AutoDJ criteria boxes.