Playlists are a great way of listening to your songs, because they allow you to specify the style or range of music while still keeping an element of surprise. Unfortunately, most music players force you create playlists by dragging and dropping or selecting individual songs. If you have a large collection, this can take much, much longer than you'd like. Not so with Random Playlist Creator with Genres, however, a very handy app that lets you create your playlists sorting by genre, artist and title, allowing you to regain control of your tunes.
Random Playlist Creator with Genres (yes, even the developer admits that it’s a bit of a mouthful!) consists of a simple interface and limited options. That's ok though, because the program performs its job with total ease. You show it where you keep your music, and it scans all your songs into its database. It then presents the music to you in several windows - song information, genre and artist. You specify how you want to define your playlist - by duration, number of songs or size - and the you get down to the business of specifying exactly what you do or don't want it to contain, selecting or unselecting genres, artists, titles etc.
Obviously the main drawback to this method is that your song tags have to be in good order for Random Playlist Creator with Genres to be able to use the information they provide. If you want the program to work properly, you'll have to sort those issues out first. Tag management is a job you can either do manually, or with the help of a program like mp3Tag.
In my small, well-tagged collection, Random Playlist Creator with Genres worked beautifully, saving my playlists in files that were easily read by my media player. The genre selection cuts out a huge amount of playlist-creation work, and the ability to filter on three levels means that your playlists should turn out exactly as you want them.
Random Playlist Creator with Genres - far more efficient than the name suggests!
