Playlists

A Playlist is a normal text file that lists one or more media files (Audio or Video), and plays them in succession. You can either create your own or use existing playlists from other sources, e.g. Winamp M3U playlists.

Supported Playlists
XBMC supports PLS, Winamp M3U, Cue Sheets, and XBMC Smart Playlist (XSP) playlists.

Playlist Locations
Playlists are by default stored in subfolders of the Playlists folder in The UserData Folder. Playlists can be run from anywhere, but the music and video library playlist nodes look in the following folders:
 * mixed - playlists containing both audio and music videos, will show in both the Music and Video Libraries.
 * music - playlists containing audio only, will show in the Music Library.
 * video - playlists containing videos only, will show in the Video Library.

Cue Sheets
Cue Sheet, or a "cue" file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a AudioCD or AudioDVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a ".cue" filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players, including XBMC Media Center.

For an AudioCD, a cue sheet specifies titles and performers for the disc and its tracks as well as the names of one or more audio files to be used. MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, and DTS files are often used, although any audio formats is really supported. Cue sheets are especially useful when burning or listening to live sets where all tracks are recorded in one single file.

For more information on Cue Sheet and "cue" files please see our main article on Cue Sheets.

Smart Playlists
{| XBMC now supports "Smart" playlists for all types of media, which essentially use a set of rules to limit the results from the databases.
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Smart playlists can be created either by using the built-in GUI Smart Playlist Editor accessible from the Playlist section, or by creating an xml file with the extension .xsp (XBMC Smart Playlist).

Format of a Smart Playlist File
Smart playlists are plain text files that can be parsed by an xml reader. Any text editor can be used to create them. The format is as follows:

Smart playlists can be of type music, video or mixed. If the type tag is left out, XBMC assumes music. Basically there are 2 header tags, and and then a set of tags that define the rules to use, along with an tag to allow sorting and a tag to limit the returned results. Note that the tags and attributes are all case-sensitive. The tag is the name of the playlist (currently unused) and the tag indicates how the tags should be matched. If all like in the above example, then only songs which satisfy all the 's will be included. If one is specified, then songs that satisfy any one (or more) of the 's will be included.

The tags, of which there can be as many as you wish, have 2 attributes (field and operator) and a value (the parameter). The allowed fields are:

The operator attribute specifies the rule that should be used to match the parameter to the field. All matching is done case-insensitive. The allowed operators are

The tag simply takes a number of songs as it's limit. A missing limit tag, or 0 will retrieve all matching songs. The tag has a direction attribute, the values of which can be "ascending" or "descending", and it's value is a field as above, or can be random if you want a random ordering returned. Note that random should be used with care - it is quite slow if the returned results from the sets is large (> 500 items).

The above example, therefore selects all songs whose artist field is U2 and whose year field is greater than 1990, orders them by the number of times they've been played (most played first) then limits it to just 50. Thus, the top 50 songs you've played from all U2 songs published after 1990.

Smart playlists should be placed in your $HOME\UserData\playlists\music folder on the xbox harddisk. They cannot be read off of remote shares at present.

Smart Playlist Examples
Recently played songs

Top 100 songs

Rock music from the 1970s

Combining Playlists
The "playlist" field can be used to combine several playlists together. When playlists are combined, the and tags of the included playlists are ignored; only the and of the final playlist are used.

As a simple example, lets create a new playlist combining the "Rock Music from the 1970s" and "Recently Played Songs" playlists above, to produce a playlist with the recently played rock songs from the 1970s.

Recently played rock tracks from the 1970s

Using this system allows very complex queries to be built. Note that in a single playlist, you can only match ALL of the rules, or ONE (or more) of the rules. This is basically either ANDing the conditions together, or ORing them together. You cannot mix AND with OR in a single playlist. To build up a playlist with both AND and OR operations on the rules, you use multiple playlists to group the AND operations and the OR operations, then combine them as above.




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