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What sets SnackAmp apart from most music players and playlist managers is its ease of use. If you have hundreds to thousands of music files, and get tired of managing individual playlists or organizing files by genre, the auto-playlist feature is for you. You use the auto-playlist manger to organize your files within a directory structure in you media library as you see fit - typically music type, artist, then album. You can then select individual folders (or folder trees) and save those settings under a name. Applying that auo-playlist will create a playlist with all of the files sorted per the sorting option in effect.
The Auto-playlist and track manager is launched (or closed) by toggling the
button on the main user interface, or
selecting the Auto-Playlists/Manage Auto-Playlists menu selection.
With the Auto-playlist feature, you can save settings that reflect your musical preference rather than specific songs. For instance Classical, Hard Rock, Dance, Relaxation would all be appropriate names. Each file you save will show up in the Auto-playlists menu to allow you to apply it easily.
Each Auto-playlist you save can be applied from either the SnackAmp or Auto-Playlist GUI using the AutoPlaylist menus. If you have the Play Settings -> Save Playlist when changing Auto-Playlists settings on, a regular playlist will be saved containing the current playlist using the base Auto-Playlist name. This allows you to switch between different Auto-Playlists and still have the ability to recall a prior playlist.
At the top of the Auto Playlist window you will find a search entry box. You may search for folders by entering some of the text and pressing Enter or selecting the Search icon. If you hit Ctrl-Enter or the Search File icon, you will locate the next matching file instead. You may also use the search icons to the left of the search entry box.
You may enter text into the filter entry box (next to the find entry box) and select the filter icon. This will restrict displayed files to those that containing the text you entered. To the left of the entry field is a combo box to select what the fields you are search in the database. If the Incremental Search option is set for the Auto Playlist settings, the filtering will take place automatically after you enter each keystroke. Pressing the Reset button will return the APL track list to the select folder.
At the top of the GUI you can select the number of subfolders to use to display tracks, . This allows you to view an entire directory tree of tracks, say for instance of an entire Artist. The ID3 Tag functions that can be applied to nodes will also apply subfolders down to the level you have selected.
Selecting the Cell Editing icon allows you to edit many of the track attributes (ID3 tags, file name, gain) in-place, like a spreadsheet. Pressing Escape while editing a cell will lose the current changes but stay in cell editing mode. Pressing Enter will commit any changes to disk. You can hit Escape twice, or press the icon again to exit the cell editing mode.
At the top of Auto Playlist selecting the History menu (or down arrow) will show a history of the recently visited folders. You also have navigation buttons to go through the history list. These are useful when you are moving files around.
You can drag select tracks or entire nodes to the playlist for queuing or with the Control key pressed, drag either to the OS to copy files or drop track names on CD burning software and so on.