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Author: Phil Sorrentino, Secretary & APCUG Rep
August 2019 issue, The Journal

The Computer Club, FL
www.scccomputerclub.org / philsorr (at) yahoo.com

A Playlist is a list of files that can be played back quality; the higher the number the better the
on a media player. If the files are pictures and quality, but the larger the file. So, once you have
the media player is a picture viewer, you have a all of your music stored in a music database,
slideshow. If the files are audio files and the me- you can start to create the playlists that will use
dia player is a music player, you get music the music files. WMP can also help you in this
played for as long as the list continues. If the task. I’ve used WMP to create many playlists,
files are video files and the media viewer is a some of which are called Love Songs, Assorted
video viewer, you may get an afternoon at the Favorites, Fun Songs, Songs from an Earlier Pe-
movies. Typically with a play list, the files can be riod, Folk Songs, Country Songs, etc.
played back sequentially for an orderly experi-
ence, or in a shuffled order for a little more ex-
citement. So technically, a playlist is a file with a playlist
file type. Many playlist file types have been de-

fined such as .zpl used by the Zune Media Play-
Audio playlists are a great way of enjoying your er (probably not many of those around), .wpl de-
digital music. Each tune to be enjoyed must be fined by Microsoft and used in WMP, .m3u origi-
in one of the music file formats that are popular, nally created by WinAmp and used in the very
.mp3, .wma, .wav, etc. .mp3 is probably the popular free WinAmp music player, .vlc, a format
most popular. .mp3 is a lossy compressed for- used by the VLC Media Player which has the
mat where the resultant files are about 1 tenth same format as .m3u except for the .vlc desig-
the size of the original file. But in the process of nation, .pls a format similar to the Windows .ini
compressing the file some of the quality is lost. file type, and others. Currently, .m3u seems to
The quality that is lost is in the higher frequen- be the most widely used file type. In my opinion,
cies, where the human ear begins to attenuate to keep your playlists most versatile, I would use
as we age, so many of us older humans may not the .m3u file type; but if you were going to only
really be missing that much. (.wav files are loss- use WMP then .wpl would be a good choice.
less, uncompressed files, so if you want all of (WMP is setup by default to create the .wpl file
the quality, you should probably save your music type. If you want WMP to create a .m3u file type,
in this file format when you get them; after all, you can change this after you have put together
nowadays storage is cheap.) By the way, Win- a list of tunes for a playlist. Right after you click
dows comes with a great application that you “save list” you will have an opportunity to change
can use to get all of your music from your CDs - the file type to .m3u.) In addition to being versa-
it’s called Windows Media Player (WMP) and tile, .m3u files can be easily modified, should
allows you to “rip” your music files from your you want to take on this tedious job. They are
CDs (which is absolutely legal). It defaults to just text files with a simple format and can be
creating .wma files, so make sure you change opened with the ”Notepad” word processor. To
this (in the Options) to .mp3 if you want .mp3 do this, just go into Windows Explorer and right
files. There is also an adjustment for the audio click the playlist and then choose “Open with…”

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