The only problem here is that Windows Media Player is not supporting the pls file format. Users who try it anyway receive the following error message:

Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.

Open PLS in WMP is a free software program for the Windows operating system that acts as a proxy between the pls file and Microsoft’s media player. Download the program from the Internet’s Codeplex project page first. The program has not been updated for three years now but it still works perfectly even with the latest Microsoft operating system and windows Media Player.

Installation should be straightforward and pose no troubles whatsoever. What you need to do afterwards is to assign the .pls file format with the newly installed Open PLS in WMP application. You do that by right-clicking a pls file on the system and selecting Properties from the context menu.

Click on the change button, navigate to the Open PLS in WMP folder (defaults to the program files folder) and select the executable there.

You can alternatively start a playlist file directly on an Internet page, but only if Windows displays a file open dialog which leads to the process described above.

All pls files in Windows are from that moment on opened with Open PLS in WMP. The program extracts the stream information from the files and sends the information to Windows Media Player where the stream is then played like other music.

You may see a warning message about AAC streams when you load streams. I’m not entirely sure why it is displayed, it did not hinder playback of the playlist files that I tried. Just close the message and Windows Media Player should start playing pls files.

You can read up on that in the following article that we published to explain the removal: About The Shoutcast Removal In VLC 1.1.

The Shoutcast Playlist Downloader is a portable software for Windows that might provide a solution to Windows users. It basically can be used to download Internet Radio playlist files. These playlist files can be executed in a compatible media player, like VLC, Winamp or AIMP2, to listen to the radio station.

shoutcast playlist downloader

It begins with a click on the Refresh button in the program interface to pull the genre listing from Shoutcast. Each genre can be checked individually to include it in the download.

Parameters like the minimum and maximum bitrate, max number of playlists per genre and compression format (AAC+ or MP3) can be specified next to the download directory.

The downloaded playlists can be saved in .pls or .plx format. The playlist files are automatically saved in genre directories to make identification easier.

The individual playlist files can be executed with a simple double-click. The playlists are ideal for transferal to XBMC, other gaming systems, mobile devices or media players on the computer. It is theoretically possible to download the playlist files manually from Shoutcast as well, which is probably the better solution for users who want more control on the selection process.

Shoutcast Playlist Downloader is available for download at the developer’s website over at Gazstone.

Enter iExporter. The software program for the Windows operating system comes with the means to easily export playlists to the computer system. The only restriction of the program is that it currently only works with native mp3 files.

The software has to be connected to iTunes upon start. This is done by clicking on the Connect to iTunes button. The software will be opened if it is not open already and the two tabs playlists and artists will be populated. The playlist tab contains all playlists that are currently available in iTunes. The artist tab on the other hand offers the possibility to export selected artists from iTunes. This did not work on the Windows XP SP3 test system though.

iExporter is a great software for iTunes users that want to export some or all of their playlists to their computer system.

Intelligent Music Scheduler uses so called libraries to create playlists. A library contains a list of music files that the user selected for inclusion. This can be the complete music collection or only part of it. The music program analyzes the songs that are selected by the user and provides several ways to use them for playlist creation.

The first tab Time is defining the basic parameters of the playlist. The user can select a number for items, minutes or megabytes which define the amount of songs, playtime or size of the songs that make up the playlist. A value of 100 items would mean that the program would pick 100 songs from the library.

That menu alone contains additional parameters that can be defined, for instance the time between songs and artists which means the minimum time the playlist has to play before the same song or a song of the same artist is played again.

The user can also pick the time between genres, lenght, year and recording time. This alone would make a pretty sophisticated playlist tool but there is more, much more. It is for example possible to play only selected genres, only albums, by rating or by music format.

Intelligent Music Scheduler uses an Audioscrobbler mashup that can be activated to use it for playlist generation. Audioscrobbler is the backbone of the popular music website last.fm. It also offers a Zararadio mashup which I’m not 100% about because I never used that service before.

The name of the software is Playlist Creator. All it does is take a number of multimedia files and create a playlist out of them. The files can be added by selecting folders or single files and sorted exactly the way you want them to be. I’m always referring to files and not songs. The reason behind this is that you can also add other multimedia files with extensions like mpeg or avi to the playlist to play them in programs like SMPlayer or MPlayer which support them.

I did not try what happens if you mix video and audio files in one playlist though. Back to the creation of the playlist. You can set the path to be relative or absolute in the options.

One feature that I think is missing is the ability to load files from subdirectories as well. My default folder structure for my music collection is band / album / files and I have to pick the album folder to add it to the playlist. It would be nice if I could select the band folder and the Playlist Creator would automatically search through all subfolders and add the files it finds.

Playlists can be saved as .pls or .m3u files. Are you using a different method to create playlists ?

The Hype Machine currently supports Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Player and a online flash player. All songs are downloaded as playlists and will be streamed to your computer. You could use streamripper with Winamp to download the files if you like.

Every time you search for an artist, song or concert you can download the playlist that was created on the fly. You could also download a playlist of the latest mp3 files that have been added to the index or search the most popular or most active music blogs.