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.

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 ?

If you do not have a software that supports plugins you could use the excellent freeware Burrn which supports many formats which are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets as well as embedded cuesheets for ape, wv and flac files. It reads the tags automatically and adds them to the burning process. Burrrn is really easy to use, it supports drag and drop and direct editing of song title and artist.

You will have to choose a burner the first time it starts. Once this is done the main window opens and you may add new songs to the CD by dragging songs or cue sheets to the main window.  If you want a certain order for your files you have to drag them one at a time. Last but not least it offers a way to adjust the replaygain for all songs before the songs are burned to the audio cd.