Playlist

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A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order.^[1] In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop.^[2] The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of television broadcasting, radio broadcasting and personal computers.

A video playlist can also be a list of recorded titles on a

The term originally came about in the early days of Top 40 radio formats in the 1950s when stations would devise (and, eventually, publish) a limited list of songs to be played.^{[citation needed]} The term would go on to refer to the entire catalog of songs that a given radio station (of any format) would draw from.^{[citation needed]} Additionally, the term was used to refer to an ordered list of songs played during a given time period.^[3] Playlists are often adjusted based on time of day, known as dayparting.^{[citation needed]}

Television

Cable TV and broadcast TV news channels often use video playlists to rerun prerecorded news stories. A given news story might initially be shown live and then placed into a playlist to be shown over and over again at a later time. News channel broadcasting is a combination of live and pre-recorded programming. The prerecorded clips are usually run from a playlist.

Computers and the Internet

As music storage and playback using personal computers became common, the term "playlist" was adopted by various

Several computer playlist formats for multimedia players, such as PLS, can pass a playlist or URL to the player. In the case of radio stations it can also link many audio players directly to the station's live streaming audio, bypassing any need for a web browser. (In that case, the playlist file is typically downloaded from the station's live streaming web page, if offered. The files are similar to Internet shortcut files in appearance and internal structure, except used by media players rather than web browsers.)

Some

A celebrity playlist is a list of songs prepared by a celebrity and represented in popular publications and on the radio as such.[5]^[6]

Web video

On

The idea of automatically generating music playlists from annotated databases was pioneered by François Pachet and Pierre Roy.^[8] Constraint satisfaction techniques were developed to create playlists that satisfy arbitrary "sequence constraints", such as continuity, diversity, similarity, etc. Since, many other techniques were proposed, such as case-based reasoning.^[9]

Other playlist methods

• A CD player that holds multiple CDs with a programmable grid mapper.
• MP3 CDs
• Prerecording a mixtape; which is purely sequential.
• Active disc-jockeying where the user manually selects the next song one after another as opposed to a preprogrammed playlist (shuffled or not)
• Stacking records in a sequence on a vinyl record changer
• A jukebox with a programmable record changer

Types of playlist files

Notable file formats used for playlists include:^[10]

• .asx, an XML style playlist containing more information about the items on the playlist^[11]
• .fpl, is a format used by foobar2000.
• .kpl, Kalliope PlayList, is a kind of XML playlist storing developed to speed up loading and managing playlists.
• .m3u/.m3u8, a simple text-based list of the locations of the items, with each item on a new line. This is one of the most popular playlist types.
• .pla, Samsung format(?), binary, Winamp handles these
• .aimppl, .plc, file extensions for AIMP.
• .mpcpl file extension for Media Player Classic playlist format and its derivatives (MPC-HC, MPC-BE etc)
• .ini (program settings) files. It provides the same functionality as extended M3U
  playlists by default (title and length).
• Digital Signage.^[12]
• .vlc is a format used by
  VLC Media Player and is defined as a renamed M3U or PLS playlist.^[13]
• .wpl, is an XML format used in Microsoft Windows Media Player versions 9–12.^[11]
• .xspf, an XML format designed to enable playlist sharing^[14]
• .zpl is a format used by Zune Media Player, Zoom Player and Creative Zen Media Players.

See also

• Music scheduling system
• Shuffle play
• Playlist markup language
• Edit decision list

References