Advantages of creating playlists?

December 5, 2005 8:04 AM

Organizing MP3s questions. I've got about 50 gigs of music on my hard drive with everything in its place, all nice and neat like. I don't have just random music all over the place, but everything is separated by artist-album in their own folder in the "C:\my music" folder (if that even matters).

If this matters, my convention is: "XTC - Box Set - CD1", "XTC - Box Set - CD2", "XTC - Box Set - CD3", "Pretty Things, the - SF Sorrow", "Beatles, the - Magical Mystery Tour", etc. Minus the quotes, of course.
Should I put everything in playlists? I'm not sure what the advantages of using playlists are. Does it make listening to music easier? Or is just breaking the music apart by music type? Can I have the same album in different playlists? When you create a playlist, are the MP3s being copied to another part of my hard drive? So now instead of having 50 gigs of music, I would have 100 gigs of music? Surely some hard drive space is being taken up by playlist creation. How long should it take me to tag all of my music to create the playlists? Or do I even need to tag them?
I use the latest version of WinAmp on a Windows XP computer. I guess I could switch to iTunes if it makes tagging/creating playlists all that music easier, but I've read here that iTunes is a resource pig and is very slow on a Windows machine.
Sorry for the flood of questions for such a trivial thing, but I need to know what I'm missing out on by not organizing my music via playlists.

posted by NoMich to computers & internet (19 comments total)

Making playlists doesn't do anything to your actual music files.

A playlist is just a small file stored elsewhere that contains a list of music files (and where to find them) in an order that you choose. When you play back a playlist, Winamp reads the playlist file, then goes and fetches each song file in turn.

So you can have the same song or album in as many different playlists as you want. And creating a playlist doesn't create a separate copy of those music files -- it just creates a playlist file.

You don't need to tag your MP3s in order to add them to a playlist. The playlist is just a list of files -- any tags that are present are just for your benefit.
posted by chrismear at 8:11 AM on December 5, 2005

That is a LOT of music. Wow.

Anyway, I never really understood the point of playlists either. I almost always listen to music by the album...maybe people like to create mixes? But to answer your question, chrismear is right, a playlist takes up practically no space at all. It's just basically a list of music.

I used to use a program called AlbumList for winamp, but have since switched over to the built-in media library. By default it is needlessly complex and ugly, but you can remove most everything, rendering it a very powerful and fast music-finding tool. I love it.
posted by lohmannn at 8:18 AM on December 5, 2005

Most playlists I've seen reference the files by a full path, which makes it a giant pain if you ever change the directory structure or move your music to a different drive.

Tags inside the MP3 files were created for exactly this purpose - organization - and software that can read and write the tags, and give you the ability to dynamically sort your music by one metric one day, another the next, was created to solve your problem.

There are many pieces of software for that, iTunes being one.
posted by odinsdream at 8:23 AM on December 5, 2005

Should I put everything in playlists? I'm not sure what the advantages of using playlists are. Does it make listening to music easier? Or is just breaking the music apart by music type? Can I have the same album in different playlists? When you create a playlist, are the MP3s being copied to another part of my hard drive?

Think of a playlist as a "pointer" to sets of music. Nothing is copied when you use playlists, so you don't have to worry about that. It's sort of a personal opinion thing - some people like them, others don't.

Surely some hard drive space is being taken up by playlist creation. How long should it take me to tag all of my music to create the playlists? Or do I even need to tag them?

Let me put it this way - you could probably have 10,000 playlists, each with 10,000 songs, and it would take up less space than 4 or 5 high-quality mp3 files. Very little space is taken up by playlists, especially if you're rocking 50 gigs of mp3s. As for tagging, I'm partial to MusicBrainz which does it automatically.

I use the latest version of WinAmp on a Windows XP computer.

The newest version of Winamp (5+) has a media library function, which scans your hard drive for mp3s and creates a searchable database for you. That, combined with tagging from MusicBrainz, should get you what you're looking for.
posted by SweetJesus at 8:33 AM on December 5, 2005

I have a pretty large collection (160GB) of fastidiously organized and well-tagged music as well, all of which is arranged by complete album, I would be lost without playlists. First off, the playlist files themselves are inconsequential in size. Second they allow for much easier listening when you don't feel like sitting through a full album and prefer to listen to singles. I have playlists with my own various "best of" comps from bands, playlists by mood, party or dance music mixes, genre comps, etc... Tags do not give you this functionality despite what odinsdream seems to suggest. That said, I'd go crazy without id3 tags as they have a great deal of value as well (they allow much easier management of your media files).
posted by drpynchon at 8:34 AM on December 5, 2005

With that much music I've found Dynamic Library essential. You browse your albums in a standard folder tree, sort the tracks and load them into the "Winamp Playlist" or enqueue them. Skips the tedious process of creating playlist files and sorting/ordering them in the abysmal "Media Library" that is the default system. It also allows you to point a few machines to the same (shared) root folder(s), so as you add/remove/reorganize music everyone gets refreshed information without having to regenerate playlists manually. If some of my song tags are goofed I run MusicBrainz over it and all is well.
posted by prostyle at 8:35 AM on December 5, 2005

I'm a huge Winamp over iTunes fan (to be fair, I've been using Winamp before Apple started putting "i" in front of everything, I'm bias) but I would recommend staying with what you know. It's not like one package has a significant advantage over the other.

I recommend using Media Library and not Windows to sort your MP3s. Media Library searches your hard drive and then allows you to search by genre/year/whatever is in the tags. You're going about this kind of backwards, just stick to Winamp and forget all the folder neatness, Media Library could not care less.
posted by geoff. at 8:36 AM on December 5, 2005

If your music is properly tagged in all categories (album, genre, bpm, year, etc.) then you do not need playlists unless you want to listen to it apart from what those tags can already categorize. For instance, if you don't use the genre tag then you would need to make a "blues" playlist if you want to only listen to blues by clicking "play" once. If you never do this but always just listen by album, you don't need playlists at all.

I've got about triple the music that you have and I only have about 15 playlists because I almost always just listen to whole albums or artists.

The sucky thing about having a lot of music is that it pretty much makes the Shuffle function useless as you probably don't want early murder ballads bumping up against opera or techno. However, you can tell iTunes to shuffle only the current playlist so that's another useful function of playlists.

For myself:

1. I make ones for artists that I have a lot of music from in order to exclude certain songs. (Sort of to make a best of that artist.) This is especially useful for jazz in which often albums have multiple renditions of the same song. I tell it to exclude all but my favorite versions as I don't like hearing the "same" track 4 times.

2. I have a smart playlist called "new" which includes all music acquired in the last X days (I keep it at 15) so that I can be sure to listen to everything as I get it.

3. I have a playlist called "instrumental" which contains my favorite voiceless tracks which cross many genres (electronic, classical, jazz, etc.) and would otherwise be impossible to group together.

4. I have "mattress music" which is my gettin' it on music--essentially a group for a certain activity (you might have "party music" or "workout music" or whatever).

5. I have one called "words" which is music I like to write to.
posted by dobbs at 8:37 AM on December 5, 2005

Then playlist have (speaking about iTunes here at least) evolved into smart playlists which I think is quite a neat thing. There is definitely music that you play on a romantic dinner, some that you play on your xmas dinner and some that you play when you are getting high. So just tag it and there you go. Of course, some of you might want to listen to the same album during a dinner, some of us wouldn't. Tagging and smart playlist I think are though the way to go.

Although tagging 50gb worth of music is not a task that I would consider easily without a sabbatical.
posted by keijo at 8:46 AM on December 5, 2005

Oh well, too slow again, everybody said already what I was taking too long to compose. Ignore.
posted by keijo at 8:47 AM on December 5, 2005

If you DO switch to iTunes (which you don't have to, but it is rather nice), be sure to not let iTunes re-arrange your music (which it really wants to), since you sound kinda anal about how you have everything organized.

The only time iTunes acts slow for me is when it's busy trying to sync up a USB device (like an iPod). The rest of the time, it's just fine.
posted by popechunk at 9:01 AM on December 5, 2005

Winamp has smart playlists. Go to the Media Library, right-click on "Local Media" and choose "add smart view". iTunes style smart playlist, all set.

Use genre tags, etc. liberally to clump your music into related groups. For example I have a playlist labeled "comfortably dumb" that only plays files tagged as mash-ups, regardless of albums. A second list will play anything tagged with "blues", but will not include blues rock - but plain blues, delta blues, etc. will be listed.

Just makes it easier if there are specific types of music you like to listen to at different times. I don't have an excessive number of playlists, usually I just enqueue multiple albums, or all songs by a specific artist.

iTunes will most definitely fuck up your careful micromanagement. However it is damn handy for batch tag management if you can get over the fact that it will totally rearrange everything if you let it. I'd say if Winamp is making you happy it isn't worth installing iTunes. The "miniplayer" in iTunes for example is IMPOSSIBLE to fit anywhere convenient on the screen, unlike Winamp, which fits nicely in the title bar when in windowshade mode. Apple really didn't make much of an effort at all to make their player work well with Windows, and as a Windows user it's a friggin' pain in the ass.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:23 AM on December 5, 2005

You might want to add the "song number" (as a two-digit number with leading zero) so that the songs can be sorted to play in the order the artist intended.

Especially with older albums, from the 60s and 70s, many artists conceived of albums as organic works, rather than simply a collection of songs.
posted by curtm at 9:32 AM on December 5, 2005

If you do switch to iTunes, SmartPlaylists.com has a ton of ways to set up playlists.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:09 AM on December 5, 2005

It sounds like NoMich has mp3s that are in a mixed state of tagging [i.e., a significant percentage are untagged or may be incorrectly tagged.] If this is the case, tagging-based solutions using the Winamp Media Library or iTunes are out. In fact, using iTunes with a music collection that includes untagged or mis-tagged mp3s is pretty much impossible. Sure, NoMich can spend several days tagging, but even with the help of MusicBrainz, tagging 50GB of mp3s is a truly formidable task, and one I wouldn't approach unless I were having some sort of week-long OCD fit.

As for myself, I have a collection a little bigger than drpynchon's, and I don't use tags or playlists to organize my things. My top level folders are artist names, and my lower level folders are album names. [There are a few special cases - the "compilations" folder and the "soundtracks" folder, for example.] Each filename includes the track number [and other information like artist and song title] so that when dragged into winamp, the songs are in the right order. Since I normally play music by the album, playlists are unecessary. Having mood-based playlists hasn't been worth my while, since I know what albums are good for which situation without having to put that information in a list. I've never seen much utility into grouping the artist folders by genre, because then you're forced to make a lot of arbitrary decisions that may end up confusing you when you're looking for a specific artist.

As you can see by the variety of answers, there's no one right way to organize your music. If you know all of the artists in your collection pretty well, and you listen to music by the album, it doesn't sound like tagging or playlists or whatever would add much to your experience [although it would require a lot of work.] If you listen to things differently [single songs that fit a theme, or a random mix] or if you listen a lot to a few artists and tend to forget about the rest, playlists might make more sense. You don't need to tag to make playlists, and it'd probably be a lot of trouble for little reward.
posted by ubersturm at 12:16 PM on December 5, 2005

MusicBrainz wrote: Let me put it this way - you could probably have 10,000 playlists, each with 10,000 songs, and it would take up less space than 4 or 5 high-quality mp3 files.

10k * 10k * 50 byte pathname = 5 gigabytes.
posted by ryanrs at 12:48 PM on December 5, 2005

I really don't think there's a right answer; it's a matter of preference. I have several hundred gigs of mp3s myself (over 5,000 physical CDs), and don't really use playlists that often. I'll use them if I want a certain genre, but for the most part it's one album at a time.

Tagging is essential to find anything easily if you don't have a solid filing system. Most people don't really care about the BPM or composer of any given track but artist, track, album and genre are pretty important. Track number is also very useful for the rare occasions you want to listen to an album in its original order.

FWIW, I basically use iTunes' formatting with the addition of the year of release becore the album title so the albums are listed in order of release. You'd need to know which album a certain track is on but it sounds like you have that covered.

My convention is
Letter
 Artist
  year album title
   track-# track-title

so it goes
A
 ABC
  1982 Lexicon of Love
    01 Show me
    02 Poison Arrow ...etc. etc.
  1983 Beauty Stab

But when I'm actually listening to them, I'll typically right-click an entire artist directory and enqueue.
posted by geckoinpdx at 12:55 PM on December 5, 2005

Thanks guys 'n gals. You've given me a lot more information than what I expected. Seriously, great stuff.
After reading this thread and contemplating it all, I've decided that there were enough compelling reasons given to create playlists. As it is right now, I just have Winamp shuffle through all of my music and it can be somewhat jarring to have the Locust screaming their beautiful noise at full blast just after a Mingus tune. I guess there are enough times that I feel like listening to just one genre of music, or grooving to a certain feel of music, regardless of genre. Willie Nelson's mellow stuff goes great with Ella Fitzgerald. So yeah, playlists could work for me.
As far as the tagging is concerned, I guess that I don't need to do that right away. I can work on it if I feel like doing busybody crap, but don't feel like pushing a broom around the house.
As for marking a best answer, this is going to be tough as all of them were terrific. Again, thanks for the input.
posted by NoMich at 5:00 PM on December 5, 2005

It sounds like NoMich has mp3s that are in a mixed state of tagging [i.e., a significant percentage are untagged or may be incorrectly tagged.] If this is the case, tagging-based solutions using the Winamp Media Library or iTunes are out.

Actually Winamp is pretty good at guessing info from the title, if the title is set up predictably. It can't auto-tag this but if tracks are titled correctly and all other data is removed from the tag it still works OK.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:21 AM on December 6, 2005