How do you organise your music playlists?

ClassifiedPancake , 1 minute ago

I used to put so much time into playlists and general organizing/finetuning back when I used iTunes. Since the streaming age I just have a huge list of favorites and play that on shuffle sometimes.

I have some special playlists. One has songs I like singing along to and one has a few womens power ballads by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion that I like to turn up on long car trips from time to time.

I also had the thought that I would like someone to curate playlists for me based on mood. I often listen to a song and think, damn I wish I had a playlist with songs like this. Then I create a playlist with one song in it, struggle with naming it, name it „Vibing“ or „Goose bumps“ or something stupid like that and then never touch it again.

TheBlackKnight , 1 hour ago

I don’t. I only have a Liked Songs on Spotify. I like the randomness of it all.

astrsk , 1 hour ago

Most of my playlists are actually by artist. Silly as it sounds I will put whole albums by the same artist in release order into new playlists by their name so I can just ask Siri to “play playlist <artist name>” and listen to the albums in order as I tend to listen to whole albums. The other playlists are like my year in review playlists that were automatically generated and some curated playlists like “weekly new music” and “top alternative” type stuff that I didn’t create but added and listen to often.

If I want a mix of stuff I like, I don’t turn to playlists anymore and instead I just ask Siri to “play some music” because the “just for you” radio is so good that I get tons of hits and top songs for my own taste as well as discover tons of new to me music that gets sprinkled in that the algorithm finds for me.

If the “play some music” stuff ends up not what I want to hear right then, I’ll just make the same request again or “play some different music” and it will switch to other music it knows I like. This is helpful when one request sends me down electronic path when I want more alt rock, etc.

vortexal , 1 hour ago

Outside of sorting them by artist, album and maybe something else depending on what it is, I kind of don’t. If there is a song that I like, I’ll download it and add it to the folder where I keep all of my music. Yes, this does cause a playlist that is massive and kind of sporadic but I already listen to artists like A-one and Sound Holic which already have at least some level of variety to the style of music they make.

jjjalljs , 1 hour ago

I don’t really do playlists for day to day. I pick an album and put it on. My music locally is organized into folders by group/album. I mostly use Bandcamp for streaming, where it’s mostly album oriented.

If I want to make a mix, where it usually have some sort of theme or coherence instead of just being “these are songs I like”, I stick it in Spotify if I want to share it.

I tend to be more depth first than some people. I find a band I like, and check out their stuff for a while. I don’t do the like “grab 3000 songs at once” mode. That sounds kind of impersonal to me, but if it works for other people it’s not my business.

some_guy , 4 hours ago

I have smart playlists for genres and for star ratings (1-5). The way the star ratings work is as follows (keep in mind that I mostly shuffle the entire library while on the go when reading how I interact with the library):

• 1 star | This is something to delete (from the days before I could do that on-device); I don’t have anything that’s 1 star anymore because we moved on

• 2 stars | This got my attention and made me check my device to find out the song / artist; this song is something special

• 3 stars | These are the bangers of my library

• 5 stars | There’s nothing better

I don’t use 4 stars; therefore, everything is either no stars (meaning normal) or 2, 3, or 5 stars.

The rule is that if I check my device to find out the song / artist and the song doesn’t already have a star rating, it automatically gets promoted to 2 stars. If it already has a star rating, it goes up by one, from 0-2, 2-3, or 3-5. This system works perfectly for me, such that when I bumped a song from 2-3 stars the other day, I said to myself, aloud (in my car), “the system works!”

I either select a genre and shuffle / randomize or I select a star rating and shuffle / randomize or (most often) I choose the entire song library and shuffle / randomize. This works well enough that I have no need for manual playlists. The only exception to this was creating a playlist for a dinner party where all the guests were other couples and the music was highly curated for a single evening.

savedbythezsh , 1 hour ago

What do you have against the number 4?

nokturne213 , 2 hours ago

Outside of work I really only listen to one band. So I have one playlist that is their entire discography, one that is their singles (not released on albums), and one of their instrumentals. Those are all ordered chronologically.

At work I have a play list of a bunch of bands I like but have clean vocals (as opposed to growls). That one is grouped by when I heard the song and added the album to the play list.

small44 , 4 hours ago

I never felt the need of creating playlists. I just have one playlist with all my songs. My local music player allows to switch between platlists and albums so if i want to listen to a whole album, i don’t have the remember the last position in my big playlist

clark OP , 4 hours ago

That actually might work out for me. Is there any way to download my Spotify songs as mp3s with accurate metadata/tags so I don’t have to do it manually?

small44 , 4 hours ago

I use zotify but i not an audiophile, i don’t know if the quality is good or bad for you

strawberry , 2 hours ago

Spotify doesn't have great quality to begin with (320kbps, whereas lossless starts at 1411kbps)

strawberry , 3 hours ago

I've just got a general playlist, sad stuff, gym, and ERM. 95% of stuff gets dumped straight into the general one

houstoneulers , 4 hours ago

I make playlists by what songs i was feeling each year. This way I can go back and reminisce and reflect on what I was going through.

Some lists repeat the same songs but are generally uniquely. For example, Radiohead’s Creep is on many of my lists.

Fleppensteijn , 4 hours ago

I have different folders for different genres, then subdivided in folders for year of release.

I spent way too much time organizing this way back so I stick with it. Problems with this are that genes can overlap (could be fixed with symlinks?) and the year is something you often have to look up (id3 often shows year of the album which is not always the year it came out).

theskyisfalling , 4 hours ago

Music I DJ with I mostly play the same genre of music so I have a few playlists for stuff that is outside of my normal genre.

Then within the stuff I usually play I’ll have smart playlists for each key (using the Camelot system so 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B etc)

I have a playlist for each month that has everything I have imported for that month of the year.

Some smart playlists to filter out a specific BPM or BPM range.

Playlists containing all the releases I have from specific labels in case I want to do a label only mix.

A playlist containing all the acapellas I have (I don’t use a massive amount) so they are all in the same place to throw over the top of some other stuff if the feeling takes me.

Then I also have some playlists that I will create off the cuff throwing in selected artists that I might want to play at a particular time to capture a certain feel or vibe, then usually they stick around and I come back to them occasionally.

A preparation playlist which is a temp playlist where I’ll throw random stuff I want to play that day maybe. Like for example I might have like this months additions and marchs additions to my library so I’ll just throw both those playlists in the one preparation playlist to play from so they are all in one list.

My music is organised in alphabetical folders within each folder I have a folder for each artist where all their releases go. If I start getting a lot of stuff from one label or end up buying a label discography I’ll make a folder for that label and remove any releases that might be in the individual artists folder and place it in the label one instead.

Then I have one random folder that has a few genre specific folders inside where I collect music from artists that I might just have one or two tracks from so they don’t deserve their own artists folder.

When I actually listen to music on Spotify I don’t use playlists. I want to listen to albums in the way they were intended, front to back usually, so I’ll usually just pick what ever album I want at the time. Occasionally if I want to delve into an unknown to me genre I might search out a playlist made by someone else to explore artists I don’t know to give me an idea of what I might want to then pursue listening to further.

ssm , 6 hours ago

${MUSICDIR}/artist/song.ext lol

deranger , 5 hours ago

No /album/ ?

some_guy , 4 hours ago

Seriously, the person you’re replying to is committing a crime by leaving that out.

southsamurai , 5 hours ago

Organization of them is highly dependent on what kind of player you’re using, because they don’t all have the same tools. Someone else would have to help you regarding services and software.

But I’m never shy about having a few dozen playlists. Nor about changing them on the fly. My digital collection is only about a terabyte currently, after a recent purge of duplicates and stuff I had saved for other people. But I’ve got something like thirty playlists on my pc, and about the same on my phone, dedicated phone music player, etc.

Since all my apps/programs default to alphabetical order for playlists, it’s pretty easy to know where the list I want is. Just scroll and find it. The band specific lists, I’ll always know where they are. Same with purpose lists like holidays. For vibes, I tend to go with the kind of mood I want to be in after listening for a bit.

Then again, I actually enjoy making playlists. I find it fun to make a list that flows, regardless of how many genres are on it.

Like I have a list called “rain” on my pc. Every song is about, or includes rain in the lyrics. The ones that use rain sound effects (like Garth Brooks, the Thunder Rolls) start the list. Garth’s is the last song on that section, and Keith Whitley’s I’m no stranger to the rain is after that. That transitions into I wish it would rain by the temptations, and so on. As the list gets played, there’s a sense of progression like a rain storm can ebb and flow through rhythm and strength.

That’s just fun for me. I get to listen to the music and really sink into it as I adjust the list for how the vibe shifts, the speed of it, etc. I’ve got lists that are similarly built that are themed on wolves & werewolves, good & evil, dreams, etc. It’s almost a hobby sometimes, just not a super frequent one.

But, I also have a miscellaneous list on every device. No real organization of it, it’s just a long list with stuff I know I’ll enjoy listening to for extended times. If I want to change the order, I can switch the sorting via the player from artist, album, or whatever options are available, and it becomes a different playlist. The one on my main phone is something like 300 songs, and that’s the smallest of them.

My “feel better” lists can range all across the board for genres, like you. They tend to start with sad songs as catharsis, stuff that I know will make me cry, or at least make me intensify the sadness so that I can’t keep it locked down and controlled, which lets me feel the sorrow more fully. Then the songs gradually shift to things that help me contemplate and process. Then finishes with things that are uplifting for me, and/or make me laugh.

I don’t know if any of that will be helpful at all, but there it is lol.

Fwiw, there’s nothing wrong with getting help building a list. I do it for my wife fairly often, and for friends too.

The key to making that easy is naming things in the same way you’ll be looking for the list

Darkassassin07 , 5 hours ago

Poorly.