Dynamic Playlists

Introduction

If you have used another media player before you are probably familiar with the concept of having all of your music in a single playlist, then playing it in random order.

If you've tried this in Amarok, especially if you have a larger collection, you may have realized that that way of managing your playlist doesn't work well. This page will explain how to use Amarok's Dynamic Playlist feature, a better way to explore your music.

To go to the Dynamic Playlist window, go to Playlists -> Dynamic Playlists from the root of the Media Sources pane.

Biases

Biases are what makes your dynamic playlist special! The default value for the dynamic playlist, without any biases, is random play. Biases of various sorts will alter that in different ways.

Proportional Bias

Proportional biases match a certain portion of the playlist to a specific value, such as Artist, Composer, Title, Genre, Year, etc.

Once you start having several The Proportional Biases it start's to get funny and tricky. The portion of each bias will be the number of songs matching the bias.

For example, if you select "0% Rating > 3 stars" then no track in the resulting playlist will have a rating above three stars.

The result of this bias will be a very flexible way of choosing your playlist. On the other hand it might lead to confusing results. A dynamic playlist containing the following two biases "50% "Michael Jackson"" "50% "Rock"" can contain tracks that are neighter from Michael Jackson nor have a Rock genre. That can happen if a track match both biases, leaving space for tracks that match neighter.

Custom Bias

This is where you will find the new last.fm and Echo Nest biases. Use last.fm or Echo Nest to bias the playlist towards artists who are similar to either the currently playing artist, your weekly top artists in Last.fm, or for Echo Nest, the current playlist as a whole.

This function will use whatever song is playing when the playlist is repopulated so your music evolves as you listen, while remaining somewhat similar to whatever is currently playing.

Fuzzy Bias

Fuzzy bias will match an approximate value and has a strictness field, as opposed to a percentage one. More strictness means more exact matches.

The resulting playlist will consist of tracks normally distributed around the requested value.

Using your Dynamic Playlist

To enable the dynamic playlist you have created simply check the On box in the upper-left corner of the pane. To regenerate the entire playlist at any time, click Repopulate, to the right of On.

The default number of items in the playlist is your 5 previous plays plus 10 upcoming items. With the currently playing track, this makes 16 items in the playlist at any given time. This number can be changed right below the On checkbox.

Below that are is the dropdown menu for loading saved playlists, the Save button, and the Delete button.

A dynamic playlist in use