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Using playlists in
Rockit, not only makes managing your music much
easier, but is indispensable for using the AutoMix
and Audio Jukebox features. By putting together a
few playlists, you can easily right click the list,
and have it run in the AutoMixer or jukebox.
So, let's build a sample
playlist, and view some of the features available,
that you may not have seen from a quick glance at
the skins.
We'll start by
right-clicking our mouse over the My Library
navigation tree, which will bring up the menu
options.
We would then click the
New Playlist option, which will bring up a
standard Windows file chooser window, and we can
enter the name of the new playlist. In this case, I
am going to call it "Tutor". You can just type the
name Tutor, without giving it an extension, as
Rockit will automatically add it (the extensions for
Rockit's playlists, are .rpf). Now simply click the
Open button, and the box will close, and the
new playlist will be available.
You can see below, that
the playlist was created, and inserted into the list
in alphabetical order. At this point it is simply an
empty playlist, so we'll drag and drop some songs
into it.
You can easily navigate
to the entire library view, select the songs you
want by using the standard Windows mouse+key combos
(Shift+left-click, Ctrl+left-click), and simply drag
the tracks over the playlist. The key combos above,
are used for selecting multiple files at a time. If
you want just one, then simply drag that single
file.
When the mouse is over a
playlist that it can drop to, you will see the mouse
pointer will have a little green plus sign next to
it, indicating that it appropriate to drop there.
Ok, now we have some
tracks in our new playlist, but they might not be in
the order we want them in. Note that when you add
tracks to a playlist, they are inserted in the order
you add them, and do not sort automatically, so as
to preserve the order of the list. No problem, we
simply highlight the list we want, right-click, and
choose Edit Playlist, and our Playlist Editor
will pop up:
As you can see, the
Playlist Editor allows you to Add tracks, Delete
tracks, Move tracks up or down, and also allows you
to update the tags in the playlist files. When you
are finished with your editing, simply click the
Save button, and your changes will be saved, and
you will be returned to the main Rockit screen.
Tip: The Tag
Update feature is useful if you make batch changes
to the MP3 tags of your files outside Rockit, or
even from Rockit's Multi-File Tag Editor. You can
simply Select All tracks in the playlist, click the
Tag Upd button, and any changes that have been made
to the tags on disk, will update the Playlist.
Rockit's playlists are
identical to a full library, with the only
difference being the file extension.
Tip: If you have
your music in some sort of hierarchy on your hard
drive, as many do, you can easily use that to create
playlists.
For example, let's say
your music is stored something like this:
C:\MP3
\Country
\Dance
\80s
\90s
\etc...
You can navigate to the
folder you want to create a playlist from in
Rockit's My Computer Explorer, right-click the
folder, and choose Create Playlist from Folder,
and it will duplicate that folder as a playlist.
This makes it easy to change the order, etc., as
above.
Tip: If you
wanted to create a playlist for an artist, genre,
year, etc., that is easy enough. Simply click the
button you want, for example Artists, and display
the tracks from the Artist you want. Now, click the
Library/Playlists button, and the My Library tree
will change back to show the playlists, yet the
Artists tracks will still be displayed in the main
track list, until you click something in the tree.
You can simply Select All tracks (or whichever ones
you want), and drag them to a playlist you already
created (let's say Bruce Springsteen).
So that's about it. As
you can see, playlists are very easy to work with in
Rockit, and can save you lots of time, as you can
simply right-click a playlist, and then have it
AutoMix, Play in the Jukebox, load to a queue, etc. |
