Playlists and smart playlists

This page explains how to create, change and delete playlists, how to add songs to them, and how smart playlists work. Playlists live on your music server (or in your YouTube Music account); Listen does not keep playlists of its own.

What each source can do

Buttons for things a source cannot do are not shown. On YouTube Music you need to be signed in with an account; as a guest you can browse and play but not change playlists. A playlist you do not own, and YouTube Music’s built-in lists such as Liked Music, can be played but not edited. YouTube Music support is unofficial; see YouTube Music.

The Playlists page

The sidebar already lists your playlists, so the Playlists page is not in its list of pages by default. Show it by ticking Playlists in Settings → General → Sidebar, or open it from Go to page… in the command palette, or click the Playlists heading in the collapsed sidebar. The page shows your playlists as a grid or table. The header has:

• the title and the number of playlists,
• Play, which plays all listed playlists following your play button behavior,
• a Search box (matches name, owner and description),
• a sort menu with Name, Song count, Duration, Owner and Visibility, and an order button,
• Refresh,
• Create playlist and, on Navidrome, Create smart playlist,
• the display buttons and list options described in Lists, selection and menus.

Creating a playlist

Any of these opens the Create playlist window:

• the + button next to Playlists in the sidebar (or in the collapsed rail),
• Create playlist on the Playlists page,
• Create playlist… in the command palette,
• Add to playlist… on a song, typing a name in New playlist… and pressing Create (this creates the playlist with the selected songs in it).

The window has a Name, and, when the server supports it, a Description and a Public checkbox. Press Create. Playlists start private unless you tick Public. On Navidrome a public playlist is visible to the other users of your server.

Opening a playlist

Click a playlist in the sidebar, in the Playlists page, in the home page or in the palette. The top of the page shows:

• the cover,
• the word PLAYLIST, a Public or Private badge and, for smart playlists, a SMART badge,
• the owner, number of songs and total time,
• Play (or Add next / Add last per your setting), Add next, Add last and a chevron with the shuffled variants, and More options, which opens the playlist’s menu,
• the description, with Show more when it is long.

The toolbar below has:

Recommended songs

Below the last song of a playlist, Listen offers five Recommended songs that should fit it: your server’s own similarity (Navidrome’s and OpenSubsonic’s getSimilarSongs2, Jellyfin’s Similar) seeded with the playlist’s first, last and middle song, or a YouTube Music radio around them. Songs the playlist already has are never offered, and the five are picked at random from everything that fits, so the strip changes as you open playlists.

• a click on a recommended song plays it and the rest of the strip,
• the + at its right adds it to this playlist in one click; the row disappears and a message confirms it,
• the ↻ button next to Recommended asks for another five.

The strip is cached per playlist for ten minutes, so scrolling up and down or coming back to the page does not ask the server again; Refresh in the toolbar, or the ↻ button, asks again. Local folders have no server-side similarity, so they show no strip, and neither does an empty playlist.

Editing a playlist

Name, description, visibility and cover

Right-click the playlist (in the sidebar, the Playlists page or its own page) and choose Edit playlist…. Change the Name, Description or Public, and press Save. This is also how you rename a playlist. On YouTube Music the window reminds you that the current description and visibility are not shown; only the changes you make are sent.

If your Navidrome server can store playlist covers, small + and bin buttons appear over the cover of your own playlists. The + asks for an image file (PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, up to 10 MB). The bin removes the uploaded cover.

Changing the order

1. Open the playlist and press Edit.
2. Drag the rows by the grip in the first column to their new places. The row where you will drop it is outlined.
3. Press Save and replace and confirm “Replace the playlist with the new order? Are you sure?”. Press Cancel to throw the changes away.

In edit mode, Order for smooth mixing puts the songs into an order that mixes well, the way the DJs order their picks (see Order for smooth mixing). The first song stays first. Check the result, drag anything you want elsewhere, and press Save and replace to keep it or Cancel to throw it away.

To just listen in that order without changing the playlist, right-click it and choose Play in smooth order.

While you edit, search, sort and filters are switched off and the page shows the songs as tracks. Save and replace writes the whole playlist back to the server, so avoid editing the same playlist elsewhere at the same time. Edit is only offered for playlists you own on servers that can reorder (Navidrome, OpenSubsonic and YouTube Music). If you press it before a long playlist has finished loading, Listen tells you to wait.

Removing songs

Select one or more songs in the open playlist, right-click and choose Remove from playlist. After you confirm (“Are you sure you want to remove this song from …?”) the songs are removed from the playlist on the server. The songs themselves stay in your library.

Deleting a playlist

Right-click the playlist and choose Delete playlist…. The menu then asks “Delete …? This can’t be undone.” Choose Delete to remove it or Cancel to keep it.

Adding songs to a playlist

There are three ways.

From a menu. Right-click songs, an album, an artist, a genre, another playlist or a folder, and choose Add to playlist…. The menu turns into a picker:

• a Search playlists… box (it finds names even when you leave letters out),
• New playlist… and Create, to make a new playlist with these songs (only on servers that can create playlists),
• Skip duplicates, a tick box: songs already in the playlist are not added again. It is off by default, applies on Navidrome, OpenSubsonic and Jellyfin, and is not offered for YouTube Music.
• the list of your playlists, with the one you used last pinned at the top and marked with a star.

Click a playlist to add the songs. A notification says what was added. Albums, artists and folders are added as all their songs.

By dragging. Select songs, drag them to one of your playlists in the sidebar and release. See Drag and drop.

On YouTube Music the picker shows a check mark behind playlists that already contain the song, and does not let you add it to them again. Songs always go into the playlist on their own server, so a queue that mixes servers can only add to a playlist of the song’s source.

Smart playlists

A smart playlist has no fixed list of songs. It stores rules, such as “genre contains rock and rating is greater than 3, sorted by play count, limited to 50”, and the server works out the songs. Smart playlists are a Navidrome feature, and Listen edits them through Navidrome’s own API. They appear in the sidebar like any other playlist, with a SMART badge on the playlist page.

Creating and editing

Press Create smart playlist on the Playlists page. To change an existing one, press Edit rules on its page or right-click and choose Edit smart rules…. The editor window has:

A rule group has a selector, Match all or Match any, and the buttons Add rule and Add rule group. Groups can be nested inside each other. The top group also has Reset to default and Clear filters; nested groups have Remove rule group.

A rule is a Field, an Operator and a value:

The fields are the ones Navidrome knows, such as Name, Album, Artist, Album Artist, Genre, Year, Duration, BPM, Bitrate, Is Favorite, Rating, Play Count, Date Added, Date Last Played, File Path and many tag fields. If you use tags Navidrome indexes under other names, add them in Settings → General → Query builder → Custom fields: give each a Label, a type (string, number, boolean, date or playlist) and the Tag name used in rules. That section only exists while the server you browse supports smart playlists.

Press Create (or Save). The editor refuses an empty name, and shows the server’s message if the rules are not valid. Afterwards the playlist page opens and shows the songs the rules select.

Notes

• Smart playlists are computed by the server. Listen only edits the rules and shows the result, so the same list also appears in other Navidrome apps.
• The contents come from the rules, so change the rules rather than adding, removing or moving songs by hand.