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Aplaylist is a list ofvideo oraudio files that can be played back on amedia player, either sequentially or in ashuffled order.[1] In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in aloop.[2] The term has several specialized meanings in the realms oftelevision broadcasting,radio broadcasting andpersonal computers.
A video playlist can also be a list of recorded titles on adigital video disk (DVD). On the internet, a playlist can be a list of chapters in a movieserial; for example,Flash Gordon in thePlanet Mongo is available onYouTube as a playlist of thirteen consecutive video chapters.
The term originally came about in the early days ofTop 40radio 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 asdayparting.[citation needed]
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.
As music storage and playback using personal computers became common, the term "playlist" was adopted by variousmedia player software programs intended to organize and control music on a PC. Such playlists may be defined, stored, and selected to run either in sequence or if a random playlist function is selected, in a random order. Playlists' uses include allowing a particular desired musical atmosphere to be created and maintained without constant user interaction or allowing a variety of different styles of music to be played, again without maintenance.
Several computer playlist formats for multimedia players, such asPLS, can pass a playlist orURL 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 toInternet shortcut files in appearance and internal structure, except used by media players rather than web browsers.)
SomeInternet streaming services, such asSpotify,[4]Amazon Music, and the defunct8tracks,Playlist.com andWebjay, allow users to categorize, edit, and listen to playlists online. Other sites focus on playlist creation aided by personalized song recommendations, ratings, and reviews. On certain sites, users create and share annotated playlists, giving visitors the option to read contextual information or reviewer comments about each song while listening. Some sites only allow the sharing of the playlist data with the actual music being delivered by other channels (e.g., Plurn), others provide a closed catalog of content from which the playlists can be generated, and sites likeimeem allow users to upload the music to central servers to be shared and accessed by any user of the site.iPods can also be used to build playlists.
Pandora is another music streaming service that is available on the Internet. Pandora is one of the few music services that is free (no subscription required) to users. The user can select genres that are played back at random on Pandora's playlists.
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]
Onvideo hosting service websites such as YouTube andVimeo, users can make playlists of select videos from themselves or other users for topical purposes;[7] paid accounts can upgrade playlists of their own videos to "shows".
Mostmedia players, such asWinamp, can easily create custom playlists from one's media library. For example, in asoftware MP3 player forWindows,Android, ormacOS, the desired tunes are typically dragged and dropped from the user's music library into the player's "edit or create playlist" window and saved.
The idea of automatically generating music playlists from annotated databases was pioneered byFrançois 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 ascase-based reasoning.[9]
Notable file formats used for playlists include:[10]