Creating a playlist
The Playlist Manager within the a2b music Player provides you with the
capability to gather any of your songs together into a collection called a
playlist. This is nothing short of fantastic, for it enables you to create your
own custom collection of digital songs, which can be played as if they were consecutive
song tracks on a CD!
The notion of a playlist is just that: a list of songs to play. The playlist manager does
not move or rename your digital song files; it simply refers to them as an ordered list,
the first representing track 1, the second representing track 2, et cetera. A playlist
cannot be embedded within a playlist; only .aac or .mes files
are valid members for a playlist.
You may refer to the same digital song name from within as many playlists as you
desire. A playlist may be as long or as short as you wish. Playlists can be reordered
with ease, as shown below. Illustrated is the Playlist Manager window, which comes up
when you select from the Player Menu Bar:
File->Playlist Manager
We have loaded a playlist entitled My Favorites which currently
comprises the list of digital songs "Black Water" through "You've Got a Friend" . A load or an save
brings up the file browser, with which you can find any of your stored playlists. Similarly, selecting the add
button brings up the file browser for digital songs.
The Playlist Manager command button semantics are as follows:
Create: create a new playlist
Load: open an existing playlist ( a file of type .a2b )
Save: Save this playlist file
Play: play this Playlist
Add: add a song to this playlist
Delete: delete a song from this playlist
Move up: move a song up 1 track in the playlist
Move down: move a song down 1 track in the playlist
So to make your first playlist do the following within the Playlist Manager:
- Click Create to create your new playlist
- Click Add to add song(s) to this playlist
- Click Save and name your playlist
That's all there is to it! Anytime after this you can play selections from this particular playlist
by hitting the Play button within the Playlist Manager.
When you later Load this playlist, you can add songs to it as you did before with
the Add button;
you can rearrange the list by highlighting a selection and then a sequence of Move up and/or Move down clicks.
Use the
Playlist Manager to create you own unique blend of music!
Organizing my songs
Song organization is completely at your discretion. Every digital song you download is stored
as a file with the suffix .mes. Every Playlist you create is stored is a file with
the suffix .a2b. The a2b music Player will store these files by default
into the directory named Music, but you may move them to
any location you so desire.
Organization is normally done to avoid chaos. In this case, until you have a large number of songs
then you may not worry too much about it. But if you do move your song files, then any playlists
that referred to them in their former location are now invalid. So remember, when you reorganize
you will also have to redo your playlists. Here is a case where early thought to some organization
(for instance, subdirectories named rock, classical, blues, ...) will save you a lot of work later.
