What is a playlist: basic concepts and types

Undoubtedly, fans of music and video very often encounter the notion of playlists. What is a playlist and how to use it in practice, we now and understand. In addition, we will try to decide which lists are the most common, and what settings are present in them.

What is a playlist?

For the initial explanation of the concept, we start from its English notation. Playlist is a word that, in fact, is composed of two: play and list. The first means "play", "lose", the second means "sheet", "list".

Based on this, in the Russian translation we get an understanding of what a playlist is. This is a playlist, including, for example, musical compositions, videos, etc.

What is most interesting, if you use the playback of music or video files directly from the hard drive of a computer, a removable device or an optical disc, most modern software players support the addition of completely different formats in one list, and it does not matter if it's music or video.

As for the file formats containing the 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, songs of different performers or genres greatly facilitated the reproduction in the future. It was not necessary to insert songs into the player's field again and again, especially to manually switch from track to track.

Understanding what a playlist is, you can even say that it is an ordered list of files that should be played in strict sequence (although many software players have the function of mixing content and playing the files in random order).

No less interesting is the fact that a somewhat earlier "native" Windows player called Windows Media Player could not create its own playlists, but easily recognized the above formats. This function became available much later.

How to create a playlist in Winamp or a similar player

One of the most revered among music lovers software players is Winamp, which, without a doubt, can be attributed to the ancestors of this type of programs and applications. Virtually all the other players after the advent of Winamp were created in its image. Take the same AIMP. He does not even look different in the interface.

However, 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. Bottom of the panel is a button "+" or the corresponding command "Add" (depending on the version of the application). You can use separate files as well as whole folders.

After adding, all selected items will appear in the playlist window. Now it's a little thing. It remains only to save the list by selecting the appropriate menu command for this, and specify 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, there is also a choice of the format of the file to be saved. This is done in order to be able to open the list in other players, which universal formats do not support.

Online TV

Ode only music and video, present, so to speak, in a stationary form, the case is limited. Many players, designed to watch online TV, also assume the function of creating playlists.

In most cases, the TV playlist is a constantly updated list of Internet TV channels available for viewing (sometimes - a normal TV program). In some cases, the list is updated automatically when opened, sometimes it needs to be done manually.

A vivid example of the use of standard TV playlists are programs like TV Player Classic or Ace Stream player, designed to watch TV channels through torrent with increased speed of video and audio stream.

Radio online

For Internet radio also provides for the use of playlists that are downloaded directly from the Internet or created by the user themselves. Here you can note, for example, the radio station "Russian radio". A playlist from an official source is automatically downloaded into the program for listening in an updated form (in this case it is a list of played songs, among which you can repeat even those that recently sounded on the air).

Naturally, if desired, the listener can choose 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 to the selected location on the computer. But, as practice shows, many people use automatic updates in the hope of finding something new.

Conclusion

Here, in fact, and all the brief information that will help understand what a playlist is. Naturally, when using playlists, you can find a lot of hidden functions and capabilities, but here everything depends on the type of program preferred for playing or the capabilities of the Internet resource.