Dreamsoft MP3 Manager

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Playlist Management
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Playlist Management

Playlist management is another major use of MP3 Manager. Through playlists, you can group different songs of your MP3 collection together to suit certain listening moods. For example, you can put together a list of instrumental music to help put yourself to bed after drinking too many cups of coffee in the morning. Or if you brought your date home, you can swoon her (or for the ladies, him) by loading up a pre-made playlist of love ballads. Not that I'd know anything about that, of course. As you might guess, the possibilities for playlists are simply limitless.

When loading playlist, by default MP3 Manager will try to load then files saved into it. If some files are not available - usually because they're on removable media, have since been renamed, or just not there at all, a message will appear. They are ignored and removed from the playlist, but remains in list until you save it (overwrite it).

The playlist pane's right-click popup menu contains just a dozen of the many things that can be done to the playlist contents. I'll discuss them first before I get to the really good stuff.

Moving along, we have the traditional Cut/Copy/Paste trio for easy file/playlist manipulation. Paste tracks from the clipboard to the playlist. Copy tracks from the playlist into a new folder. This comes in very handy.

Filling the remainder menu, we have the various mini-tools which are pretty self-explanatory. For "fine tuning" your playlist, there is a set of Slide functions which take selections up/down or to the top/bottom of the list.

Finally, we have the File Properties function which lets you view informations of the selected file(s) or edit the tag information of the file (for more than 1 selected files). Filling in as many ID3 fields as you can for each of your files is perhaps one of the most important things to do for improving the flexibility of your collection. Adding genre, album, and year information allows you to find the songs you want when and how you want them later in the Search utility.

You can write Titles, Artists, and Album fields of any length your desire, thanks to the partial Lyrics3 tag support. (You can't view/edit lyrics however.. at least, not right now.)

Starting from RC3, tagging is even easier with auto-complete.  You've probably seen auto-complete before in the browser you're viewing this page with.  Well, now it's right there inside ShufflePlay. 

Version 3.5 introduced a feature to make tagging still easier. The Rename Wizard will take you from untagged files to, well, tagged and renamed with one click! 

Tagging not only makes everything look neater--it increases the power of the advanced tools like the HTML and Text publishers.