This is the fourth post in my series about MusicIP Mixer, and I haven’t yet said anything specific about creating playlists. Partly that’s because I assume you know how to create basic mixes already (Hint: if you don’t, push the New Mix button at the top left), and partly it’s because I wanted to set up some background and get some of the less well know features exposed a bit more.

Well now it’s time to dig into a sample of an advanced playlist. There’s lots of different ways to create mixes inside MusicIP Mixer. In this post, I’m going to show you how to create one like my Valentine’s Day playlist on FIQL (as alluded to in my last post). The instructions sound a bit complicated, but once you try it out, it’s pretty simple.

Note that I’m going to be using waypoint mixes in this article. These are a premium feature, so you’re going to need to have a registration key to create mixes like this. Also, you’ll need to enable Power Tools from the Preferences dialog, so you can access the Power Tools menu.

Idea: My inspiration for this mix was to create a playlist which goes from the concept of light and day into night and darkness. In order to create a theme, I want to include “Break On Through” by The Doors as the midpoint of my playlist, when the songs turn from day into night.

You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side
- The Doors

I think I’ll go for a two hour playlist - that leaves plenty of time spent in the light and the dark. I’ll use my own collection of 80,000 songs as the source material to build the playlist (it’s a big collection, but certainly not the biggest I’ve seen).Here are the steps to create this playlist.

1. First I need to get my day songs together. I create an empty playlist called “Day Songs” by right-clicking in the Filters & Playlists window on the left side of the mixer, and choosing New Playlist. Next I’ll pick the songs by typing day into the search box, and dragging and dropping all songs that match to my temporary playlist. I’ll repeat this for the words light and sun. (I could use a power search to do this, but it requires a bit more typing: ?name contains "light" or name contains "day" or name contains "sun"). After filling up the playlist of candidate songs, I do a quick scan for anything that’s too removed from my theme (it looks like the sun keyword’s giving me the best set of songs), and delete it from the list. Lastly, I drag “Break On Through” over (typing break on through into the search box brings up this track).
2. Next, I get my night songs together. I repeat the process above, only with night, evening, and dark as keywords.
3. Now it’s time to get mixing. If I had a starting song in mind, I’d select that and “Break on through”, and do a simple waypoint mix. Since I don’t really care where I start, what I’d like to do is get a good contrast between my start and end points. There’s a few ways to do this, but I think for now I’ll just select “Break On Through” and do an Anchored Smooth Shuffle. This sorts the playlist with the first song at the top, and moves smoothly through the list. Thus the last track is more or less the farthest from the first one. Since I have a lot of songs, I can pick the end point from the bottom of the list based on whatever mood strikes me. In my case, the song I chose was “Beautiful Day” by Mellowdrone. This will give the starting point of my playlist a kind of techno vibe. Now that I know my start and end songs, I set the mix controls to 60 minutes, and make a mix from my day songs by using Power Tools/Waypoint Mix/Loose Paths. I create a new playlist to hold the result “Night and Day”. (If there was a song I really wanted in the list which got dropped, I could add it back in this step, and do another anchored smooth shuffle to put it in the right spot).
4. Finally, I repeat the process for my night songs. The end point in this case is Sleater-Kinney’s “Night Light”. I picked this because it ends this list with a light reference with sort of loops back to the initial theme, and also the music goes in a darker direction (one alternative was a Kenny G track, but I didn’t want to go there.) This time, when I drag the songs into my “Night and Day” playlist, I’ll leave out “Break on Through”, since it’s already in the list.
5. That’s it. Now I can just select the playlist, and press play.

And here’s the result:

For your pleasure, I’ve included links to FIQL, a raw XSPF playlist (no song URLs though), and a mip:import link.

Try importing this into your collection, and see what it does for you. If you have to replace too many songs, you may lose the theme of night and day - but maybe you’ll find something else interesting in the process. Notice how the playlist centers around 60’s music, as a result of the track by The Doors.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 8:57 am and is filed under MusicIP Mixer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.