TITLE: Making playlists for cmus
DATE: 2020-09-10
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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I use cmus as the music player on my laptop. I routinely use the 
track queue feature to create an immediate playlist of the next few 
songs, but never got to grips with creating persistent themed 
playlists. It turns out it's not that hard, the documentation just 
seems a bit sparse.

  [cmus]: https://github.com/cmus/cmus

Playlists are stored in plain text files, on my system inside 
~/.config/cmus/playlists/. The default playlist (filename and 
playlist name) is created by default. It's merely a list of 
filepaths referencing song locations, one filepath per line. The 
filename can contain spaces and so can the filepaths, with no 
quoting or escape sequences required. New playlists can be added by 
adding files to the directory. An example playlist:

    /Volumes/share/music/Ben Caplan/Birds With Broken Wings/12 Ben 
Caplan - Canary.mp3
    /Volumes/share/music/Bloc Party/Silent Alarm/07 This Modern 
Love.mp3
    /Volumes/share/music/Family Atlantica/Cosmic Unity/06 La 
Humanidad.mp3

In cmus, it appears it is possible to add songs to the current 
playlist (y), marked by an asterisk in the playlist view (view 3). 
To select a playlist, highlight it and press . To create a new 
playlist, type :pl-create <playlist_name>. It's also possible to 
create the playlists outside of cmus using a file manager, then 
load them automatically when cmus starts.