Playlist management is another major use of ShufflePlay. Through playlists, you can group different songs of your MP3 collection together to suit certain listening moods. For example, you can put together a list of instrumental music to help put yourself to bed after drinking too many cups of coffee in the morning. Or if you brought your date home, you can swoon her (or for the ladies, him) by loading up a pre-made playlist of love ballads. Not that I'd know anything about that, of course. As you might guess, the possibilities for playlists are simply limitless.

When loading playlists, by default ShufflePlay will show you files that are in the list, but not available -- usually because they're on removable media, have since been renamed, or just not there at all. They are denoted by asterisks to easily spot for fixing your playlist.

The playlist pane's right-click popup menu contains just a dozen of the many things that can be done to the playlist contents. I'll discuss them first before I get to the really good stuff.

Starting with the top of the context menu, we have the list playback functions. You can play just highlighted songs, the entire list, or a pre-shuffled version of the list. Yes, most players have a Shuffled-play function (except Winplay3, hahaha), but this lets you decide per list to play a list the way it is, or shuffle it before passing down to Winamp or whatever player you use.

Next, we have the Enqueue functions. Not all players support this, but it's there to let you stick songs in the player's active playlist without disturbing the current song. This is a godsend for the MP3 DJ types.

Moving along, we have the traditional Cut/Copy/Paste trio for easy file/playlist manipulation. Paste tracks from the clipboard to the playlist. Copy tracks from the playlist into a new folder. This comes in very handy. 

On top of this functionality, newer versions of ShufflePlay also boast drag-and-drop arrangement of tracks.  Just drag the file and drop it where you want to place it in the list.  The playlist will automatically scroll if you need to drop it in a position not initially visible.

Filling the remainder menu, we have the various mini-tools which are pretty self-explanatory. For "fine tuning" your playlist, there is a set of Slide functions which take selections up/down or to the top/bottom of the list, though they may not be as valuable since the addition of the drag-and-drop support.

Finally, we have the Properties function which lets you edit the tag information of the file. Filling in as many ID3 fields as you can for each of your files is perhaps one of the most important things to do for improving the flexibility of your collection. Adding genre, album, and year information allows you to find the songs you want when and how you want them later in the Search utility.

You can write Titles, Artists, and Album fields of any length your desire, thanks to the partial Lyrics3 tag support. (You can't view/edit lyrics however.. at least, not right now.)

Tagging is even easier with auto-complete.  You've probably seen auto-complete before in the browser you're viewing this page with.  Well, now it's right there inside ShufflePlay. 

Not only will the Properties dialog let you tag one file, but you can tag consecutive files, too!  And you get the choice of tagging them individually (to enter individual filenames, for example) or you can tag them all at once (to enter common entries like album titles).

Version 2.60 introduced a feature to make tagging still easier.  The Tag and Rename Wizard will take you from untagged files to, well, tagged and renamed with one click! 

Tagging not only makes everything look neater--it increases the power of the advanced tools like the HTML and Text publishers.  Virtual drives also add to the power of the publishing tools, so we will visit this nifty capability next!

> I can't stand the suspense. Show me the Virtual Drives!