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By Mark Harris, About.com Guide to Digital Music

Smart Playlists: Create Song Lists That Keep an Eye on Your Music Library

Friday June 12, 2009

If you've got a sizable music collection, then creating playlists is an essential task for playing, burning, and syncing your music in an efficient way. Most, if not all, software media players support the use of playlists which you can use to organize your music library in many different ways. The only downside to using normal playlists is that unless you update them manually, they never change. So, what's the alternative?

Some software media players such as Windows Media Player 9 and higher, support the use of smart playlists that dynamically change depending on the contents of your music library. Windows Media Player uses Auto Playlists which intelligently follow rules that you set. For example, if you define an Auto Playlist to contain only a certain genre, then it will populate itself with tracks from your music library that meet that rule. Even if you update your library with more of the same genre, your Auto Playlist will keep up to speed by automatically updating - this saves time when compared to normal playlists which would need to be manually edited. If you regularly add music to your collection and want a consistent order to your playlists, then smart playlists are worth using.

For more information on creating smart playlists in Microsoft Windows Media Player, be sure to read our guide on Creating Auto Playlists.

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