Art of the Playlist

Just like a good album, a good playlist can be a work of art in itself. The playlist can create a mood, not only in the selected tracks, but the order of them. One of the downsides of today's track by track world is that listening to your music at complete random can be less than pleasing. A D'n'B track can lead in to classical, followed by a comedy set. Ugg. Luckily, the playlist is there to make things better.

I've found that some of my playlists become as loved as albums from favorite artists. I also find that listening to someone else's playlist can open doors for me. To that regard, here are a couple of playlists of mine for you to listen to. These are different than my 5 of the now because the 5otn are usually unrelated tracks and not meant to listen to as a group. To go along with the Slushy Streets playlist I posted last December, here are Sunrise Skyline and Dust and Rain. A few of the readers of this blog have already heard these, but not all. Let me know if you'd like a full listen, rather than the 30 sec iTS previews.

To help you post your own playlists, you can try my Perl script to convert an iTunes playlist XML file to HTML. For some odd reason, iTunes does not allow a simple playlist export of artist and track title. The script isn't the greatest in the world. It has a last second hack I had to put in when I encountered an Album Artist field, and I also discovered that the output is not saved in the file in the order of your playlist. You have to make use of the key IDs further down in the XML to get the order correct. That means this will output your playlist to HTML just fine, but you might need to manually fix the order, for now.