Playlist

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A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order. ^[1] In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop. ^[2] The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of television broadcasting, radio broadcasting and personal computers.

Contents

• Radio
• Television
• Computers and the Internet
• Celebrity playlists
• Web video
• Playlist generation
• Other playlist methods
• Types of playlist files
• See also
• References
• External links

A video playlist can also be a list of recorded titles on a digital video disk (DVD). On the internet, a playlist can be a list of chapters in a movie serial; for example, Flash Gordon in the Planet Mongo is available on YouTube as a playlist of thirteen consecutive video chapters.

Radio

The term originally came about in the early days of Top 40 radio formats in the 1950s when stations would devise (and, eventually, publish) a limited list of songs to be played.^{[ citation needed ]} The term would go on to refer to the entire catalog of songs that a given radio station (of any format) would draw from.^{[ citation needed ]} Additionally, the term was used to refer to an ordered list of songs played during a given time period. ^[3] Playlists are often adjusted based on time of day, known as dayparting.^{[ citation needed ]}

Television

Cable TV and broadcast TV news channels often use video playlists to rerun prerecorded news stories. A given news story might initially be shown live and then placed into a playlist to be shown over and over again at a later time. News channel broadcasting is a combination of live and pre-recorded programming. The prerecorded clips are usually run from a playlist.

Computers and the Internet

As music storage and playback using personal computers became common, the term "playlist" was adopted by various media player software programs intended to organize and control music on a PC. Such playlists may be defined, stored, and selected to run either in sequence or if a random playlist function is selected, in a random order. Playlists' uses include allowing a particular desired musical atmosphere to be created and maintained without constant user interaction or allowing a variety of different styles of music to be played, again without maintenance.

Several computer playlist formats for multimedia players, such as PLS, can pass a playlist or URL to the player. In the case of radio stations it can also link many audio players directly to the station's live streaming audio, bypassing any need for a web browser. (In that case, the playlist file is typically downloaded from the station's live streaming web page, if offered. The files are similar to Internet shortcut files in appearance and internal structure, except used by media players rather than web browsers.)

Some Internet streaming services, such as Spotify, ^[4] Amazon Music, 8tracks, and the defunct Playlist.com and Webjay, allow users to categorize, edit, and listen to playlists online. Other sites focus on playlist creation aided by personalized song recommendations, ratings, and reviews. On certain sites, users create and share annotated playlists, giving visitors the option to read contextual information or reviewer comments about each song while listening. Some sites only allow the sharing of the playlist data with the actual music being delivered by other channels (e.g., Plurn), others provide a closed catalog of content from which the playlists can be generated, and sites like imeem allow users to upload the music to central servers to be shared and accessed by any user of the site. iPods can also be used to build playlists.

Pandora is another music streaming service that is available on the Internet. Pandora is one of the few music services that is free (no subscription required) to users. The user can select genres that are played back at random on Pandora's playlists.

Celebrity playlists

A celebrity playlist is a list of songs prepared by a celebrity and represented in popular publications and on the radio as such. ^{[5] [6]}

Web video

On video hosting service websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, users can make playlists of select videos from themselves or other users for topical purposes; ^[7] paid accounts can upgrade playlists of their own videos to "shows".

Playlist generation

Most media players, such as Winamp, can easily create custom playlists from one's media library. For example, in a software MP3 player for Windows, Android, or macOS, the desired tunes are typically dragged and dropped from the user's music library into the player's "edit or create playlist" window and saved.

The idea of automatically generating music playlists from annotated databases was pioneered by François Pachet and Pierre Roy. ^[8] Constraint satisfaction techniques were developed to create playlists that satisfy arbitrary "sequence constraints", such as continuity, diversity, similarity, etc. Since, many other techniques were proposed, such as case-based reasoning. ^[9]

Other playlist methods

• A CD player that holds multiple CDs with a programmable grid mapper.
• MP3 CDs
• Prerecording a mixtape; which is purely sequential.
• Active disc-jockeying where the user manually selects the next song one after another as opposed to a preprogrammed playlist (shuffled or not)
• Stacking records in a sequence on a vinyl record changer
• A jukebox with a programmable record changer

^[10]

Types of playlist files

Notable file formats used for playlists include: ^[11]

• .asx, an XML style playlist containing more information about the items on the playlist ^[12]
• .fpl, is a format used by foobar2000.
• .kpl, Kalliope PlayList, is a kind of XML playlist storing developed to speed up loading and managing playlists.
• .m3u/.m3u8, a simple text-based list of the locations of the items, with each item on a new line. This is one of the most popular playlist types.
• .pla, Samsung format(?), binary, Winamp handles these
• .aimppl, .plc, file extensions for AIMP.
• .mpcpl file extension for Media Player Classic playlist format and its derivatives (MPC-HC, MPC-BE etc)
• .pls, a text playlist similar to .ini (program settings) files. It provides the same functionality as extended M3U playlists by default (title and length).
• .smil is an XML recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium that includes playlist features. In addition to audio, it supports video and screen layout and is heavily used in Digital Signage. ^[13]
• .vlc is a format used by VLC Media Player and is defined as a renamed M3U or PLS playlist. ^[14]
• .wpl, is an XML format used in Microsoft Windows Media Player versions 9–12. ^[12]
• .xspf, an XML format designed to enable playlist sharing ^[15]
• .zpl is a format used by Zune Media Player, Zoom Player and Creative Zen Media Players.

See also

• Music scheduling system
• Shuffle play
• Playlist markup language
• Edit decision list

Related Research Articles

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Media player software is a type of application software for playing multimedia computer files like audio and video files. Media players commonly display standard media control icons known from physical devices such as tape recorders and CD players, such as play, pause, fastforward (⏩️), rewind (⏪), and stop buttons. In addition, they generally have progress bars, which are sliders to locate the current position in the duration of the media file.

VideoLAN is a non-profit organization which develops software for playing video and other media formats. It originally developed two programs for media streaming, VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN Server (VLS), but most of the features of VLS have been incorporated into VLC, with the result renamed VLC media player.

The Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) format is a type of XML metafile designed to store a playlist of Windows Media files for a multimedia presentation.

Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.

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RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3, MP4, QuickTime File Format, Windows Media format, and the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems; Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian versions have been released.

M3U is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. One common use of the M3U file format is creating a single-entry playlist file pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and is often used in downloads from a website, for emailing, and for listening to Internet radio.

PLS is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. It is typically used by media players for streaming media over the Internet, but may also be used for playing local media.

XML Shareable Playlist Format (XSPF), pronounced spiff, is an XML-based playlist format for digital media, sponsored by the Xiph.Org Foundation.

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Webjay was a web-based playlist service launched in early 2004. Playlists consisted of links to Vorbis, MP3, WMA, RealAudio and/or other audio files on the web. Webjay users could create new playlists by copying from existing playlists, or by web scraping audio file links from external web pages or playlists. The site was created by Lucas Gonze.

WPL is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It is a proprietary file format used in Microsoft Windows Media Player versions 9–12. The elements of WPL files are represented in XML format. The top-level element, smil, specifies that the file's elements follow the SMIL structure.

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The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.

JetAudio is a shareware media player application for Microsoft Windows and Android released in 1997 which offers playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats. JetAudio is popular and well-rated for its interface, and its download count at CNET approaches 28 million downloads.

Clementine is a free and open-source audio player. It is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and the GStreamer multimedia framework. It is available for Unix-like, Windows, and macOS operating systems. Clementine is released under the terms of the GPL-3.0-or-later.

GNOME Videos, formerly known as Totem, is a media player for the GNOME computer desktop environment. GNOME Videos uses the Clutter and GTK+ toolkits. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10, but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. Totem utilizes the GStreamer framework for playback, though until version 2.27.1, it could alternatively be configured to use the Xine libraries instead of GStreamer.

Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library.

References

External links

• Lizzy, an open source Java library to process multimedia playlists by Christophe Delory