Playlist
In its most general form, a
playlist is simply a
list of
songs. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of
radio broadcasting and
personal computers.
The term originally came about in the early days of
top 40 radio formats when stations would devise (and, eventually, publish) a limited list of songs to be played. The term would go on to refer to the entire catalog of songs that a given radio station (of any format) would draw from. Additionally, the term was used to refer to an ordered list of songs played during a given time period. Playlists are often adjusted based on time of day, known as
dayparting.
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 to allow a variety of different styles of music be played, again without maintenance.
Some websites allow categorization, editing, and listening of playlists online, such as
Webjay and
Plurn. Others such as
FIQL,
Musicmobs and
Soundflavor focus on playlist creation aided by personalized song recommendations, ratings and reviews.
Playlists are lists of songs (or other audio files) that you can create to organize your library or
burn to a
compact disc. For example, you might want to create a list of songs to listen to at a dinner party. Or, if you want to make your own CD, you add the songs you want on the CD to a playlist, then burn the playlist onto the CD.
There's also a Playlist Club for digital music fans (see below).
A list of songs prepared by a
celebrity and is represented on the
Apple iTunes Music Store as such, is referred to as a
celebrity playlist. This has become popular because a
fan of a particular celebrity may have an affinity towards the celebrity's choice of music. This arms-length connection between the fan and the favored celebrity has become so popular (2004-2005) that "celebrity playlist" has become a part of recent vocabulary.
The
Playlist Club is an international London-based club night (founded in 2004) which invites digital music fans with iPods and other digital music players to turn up to play their own 15-minute sets of music through the club's PA system. Clubbers decide which sets they like the best, and awful digital DJs get stopped before they cause too much damage.
* A CD player that holds multiple CDs with a programmable grid mapper. Obsoleted by hard-drive based machines such as computers with playlist software.
* Prerecording a
mixtape; since a tape is purely sequential.
* Active disk jocking where somebody manually selects the next song one after another as opposed to a preprogrammed playlist.
There are several types of playlists. Some of the most common are:
*
.m3u, a simple text-based list of the locations of the items, with each item on a new line.
*
.pls, a text playlist similar to
.ini (program settings) files. It normally contains only the location of the items in the playlist.
*
.asx, an
xml style playlist containing more information about the items on the playlist.
*
.smil is a true
xml playlist, with standards proposed by the
World Wide Web Consortium.
*
Kalliope PlayList (.kpl) is a kind of xml playlist storing developed to speed up loading and managing playlists
*
mixtape*
music scheduling system*
iPod Playlist - July 2006
MP3 Newswire article on how playlists posted on the Net are helping to broaden consumer musical tastes.
*
FIQL*
WebJay*
Musicmobs*
Plurn*
Yahoo! Radish*
Playlist Club
