Undoubtedly, music and video lovers very often come across the concept of playlists. What is a playlist and how to use it in practice, we’ll understand now. In addition, we will try to resolve the issue of which lists are the most common, and which settings are present in them.
What is a playlist?
For the initial explanation of the concept, we will proceed from its English designation. Playlist is a word that is essentially made up of two: play and list. The first means “play”, “lose”, the second - respectively, “sheet”, “list”.
Based on this, in the Russian translation we get an understanding of what a playlist is. This is a playlist that includes, say, music, videos, etc.
Most interestingly, if you are playing music or video files directly from your computer’s hard drive, removable device or optical disk, most modern software players support the addition of completely different formats to one list, and it doesn’t matter if it is music or video.
As for file formats containing complete information about each playlist, the most common and frequently used are .m3u, .pls and others. Initially, such lists for creation were provided in such popular programs as Winamp and AIMP. Naturally, the presence of such a list when adding, say, compositions of different artists or genres greatly facilitated the reproduction in the future. There was no need to insert songs into the player field again and again, all the more manually switch from track to track.
Understanding what a playlist is, you can even say that this is a sorted list of files that must be played in strict order (although many program players have the function of mixing the contents and playing the files in random order).
No less interesting is the fact that a little earlier “native” Windows player called Windows Media Player could not create its own playlists, however, it easily recognized the above formats. This feature became available much later.
How to create a playlist in Winamp or a similar player
One of the most revered software players among music lovers is Winamp, which, no doubt, can be attributed to the founders of this type of program and application. Almost all other players after the appearance of Winamp were created in its image and likeness. Take the same AIMP. It doesn’t really even differ in interface.
But back to the question of how to create a playlist in Winamp. In order to make your own list, you need to go to the playlist menu. At the bottom of the panel there is a “+” button or the corresponding “Add” command (depending on the version of the application). In this case, you can use both individual files and entire folders.
After adding, all selected items will appear in the playlist window. Now it's up to the small. It remains only to save the list by selecting the appropriate menu command for this and indicate the location of the file to be saved. As mentioned above, it does not matter which formats will be present in one playlist.
In the latest versions of Winamp and AIMP, the choice of the format of the saved file is also provided. This is done so that you can open the list in other players that do not support universal formats.
Online tv
Only music and video, present, so to speak, in a stationary form, is limited. Many players designed to watch online television, also assume the presence of the function of creating playlists.
In most cases, a TV playlist is a constantly updated list of Internet TV channels available for viewing (sometimes a regular TV program). In some cases, the list is updated automatically when opened, sometimes it needs to be done manually.
A striking example of the use of standard TV playlists are programs such as TV Player Classic or Ace Stream player, designed to watch TV channels via torrent with increased speed of video and audio stream.
Radio online
For Internet radio, the use of playlists that are downloaded directly from the Internet or created by the user yourself is also provided. Here you can note, for example, the radio station "Russian Radio". The playlist from the official source is loaded into the program for listening automatically in an updated form (in this case, we are talking about a list of playable songs, among which you can repeat even those that were recently played on the air).
Naturally, if desired, the listener himself can choose the channels that need to be added to the playlist, say, by filtering by genre (this applies to all radio stations). After that, you can save the created list in the selected location on the computer. But, as practice shows, many use automatic updates in the hope of finding something new.
Conclusion
Here, in fact, is all the brief information that will help you understand what a playlist is. Naturally, when using playlists, you can still find a lot of hidden functions and capabilities, but here everything already depends on the type of program you prefer to play or the capabilities of the Internet resource.