Create Or Edit A Playlist
Playlists are automatically created whenever you use Play Music menu Options 2 or 4 to supply music selection criteria that match more than one recording -or, at least, you are given the option to create a playlist storing the results of those selections. However, playlists can be created manually, too, by taking the Play Music menu Option 7 : Create or edit a playlist.
Taking this menu option immediate causes the program to prompt you for the name of the playlist you're about to create or edit:
As soon as you submit [OK] (or press the [Enter] key, Giocoso determines whether the submitted name matches an existing playlist: if it does, that playlist will be opened for editing. If it doesn't, then an empty text file of the supplied name will be created for you in the $HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/play folder. When a new playlist is created in this way, the capitalisation of the supplied playlist name is preserved, but spaces are automatically replaced with underscores and a .play extension is added (so my example in the screenshot will be created as a file called Wagner's_Ring_Cycle.play).
New playlists will start off looking extremely bare:
It's literally a blank slate, for you to fill in with details of music folders you want played, in the order you want them played.
Note that in my example, the text editor Giocoso has launched is called nano: that's likely to be the default text editor on most Linux systems, but if you set the EDITOR environment parameter before you launch Giocoso, Giocoso will use that one instead. If you love vi, emacs or Mousepad, all are entirely usable.
As I just mentioned above, you should note that it's <em>folder names</em> that go into a playlist, not the names of specific FLAC files (because Giocoso plays folders, not files!). One folder name goes on one line:
This is quite a good example of why you might want to create a playlist in the first place, as it happens: there's no other way to ensure that the four parts of Wagner's Ring Cycle get played in the right order! If you left it to alphabetical sorting of folder name, Götterdämmerung would play before Siegfried -which means Siegfried would die before he gets to kill the dragon (I hope I'm not giving too many secrets away!!), which would never do :)
Once all the folders are present, in the order you want them played, you just save and quit the text editor (in nano's case, that means typing Ctrl+X, then tapping 'y' to confirm the save, and finally pressing [Enter] to confirm the filename to save as). You are then returned to the main menu. No music is played, therefore, by the mere act of creating a playlist. To have the playlist played, you now need to take the Play Music menu Option 5 and select the new playlist (by pressing [Enter] when it's highlighted), as previously described.
Playlists are nothing special: they have a .play extension, which may make them look a bit weird, but they are simply plain text files. You can therefore create or edit and re-arrange the contents of a playlist completely outside of Giocoso any time you like: just navigate to $HOME/.local/share/giocoso3/play in your file manager and use its standard tools to create or edit the files there, in the text editor of your choice. The Play Menu Option 6 is merely there to give you the capability to create or edit playlists from within Giocoso as a convenience: it's up to you which editing technique you prefer to use.
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