Using playlists in Rockit, not only makes managing your music much easier, but is indispensable for using the AutoMix and Audio Jukebox features. By putting together a few playlists, you can easily right click the list, and have it run in the AutoMixer or jukebox.

So, let's build a sample playlist, and view some of the features available, that you may not have seen from a quick glance at the skins.

As with the other tutorials, we will use the Dark Gray skin to show the images.

We'll start by right-clicking our mouse over the My Library navigation tree, which will bring up the menu options.   We would then click the New Playlist option, which will bring up a standard Windows file chooser window, and we can enter the name of the new playlist. In this case, I am going to call it "Tutor".   You can just type the name Tutor, without giving it an extension, as Rockit will automatically add it (the extensions for Rockit's playlists, are .rpf). Now simply click the Open button, and the box will close, and the new playlist will be available.

You can see to the left, that the playlist was created, and inserted into the list in alphabetical order.   At this point it is simply an empty playlist, so we'll drag and drop some songs into it.   You can easily navigate to the entire library view, select the songs you want by using the standard Windows mouse+key combos (Shift+left-click, Ctrl+left-click), and simply drag the tracks over the playlist. The key combos above, are used for selecting multiple files at a time. If you want just one, then simply drag that single file.   When the mouse is over a playlist that it can drop to, you will see the mouse pointer will have a little green plus sign next to it, indicating that it appropriate to drop there.

Ok, now we have some tracks in our new playlist, but they might not be in the order we want them in. Note that when you add tracks to a playlist, they are inserted in the order you add them, and do not sort automatically, so as to preserve the order of the list. No problem, we simply highlight the list we want, right-click, and choose Edit Playlist, and our Playlist Editor will pop up:

As you can see, the Playlist Editor allows you to Add tracks, Delete tracks, Move tracks up or down, and also allows you to update the tags in the playlist files. When you are finished with your editing, simply click the Save button, and your changes will be saved, and you will be returned to the main Rockit screen.

Tip: The Tag Update feature is useful if you make batch changes to the MP3 tags of your files outside Rockit, or even from Rockit's Multi-File Tag Editor. You can simply Select All tracks in the playlist, click the Tag Upd button, and any changes that have been made to the tags on disk, will update the Playlist.

Rockit's playlists are identical to a full library, with the only difference being the file extension.

Tip: If you have your music in some sort of hierarchy on your hard drive, as many do, you can easily use that to create playlists.

For example, let's say your music is stored something like this:

C:\MP3

   \Country

   \Dance

   \80s

   \90s

   \etc...

You can navigate to the folder you want to create a playlist from in Rockit's My Computer Explorer, right-click the folder, and choose Create Playlist from Folder, and it will duplicate that folder as a playlist. This makes it easy to change the order, etc., as above.

Tip: If you wanted to create a playlist for an artist, genre, year, etc., that is easy enough. Simply click the button you want, for example Artists, and display the tracks from the Artist you want. Now, click the Library/Playlists button, and the My Library tree will change back to show the playlists, yet the Artists tracks will still be displayed in the main track list, until you click something in the tree. You can simply Select All tracks (or whichever ones you want), and drag them to a playlist you already created (let's say Bruce Springsteen).

So that's about it. As you can see, playlists are very easy to work with in Rockit, and can save you lots of time, as you can simply right-click a playlist, and then have it AutoMix, Play in the Jukebox, load to a queue, etc.