Creating a nested playlist in Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player has never been especially friendly to classical-music listeners. You can't search on the high-level Composer field, downloaded metadata from AMG and other sources varies in quality from non-existent or garbage to muddled, and the labelling of important fields is misleading at best. However for many people, the most frustrating angle is that you cannot chain a sequence of tracks/movements together in a playlist so that they will be heard in the right order even when the playlist is shuffled.
While this cannot be done within the Media Player user interface, it can be "hacked" one playlist at a time using just Notepad.
Each sequence of tracks that you would like linked - say the movements of
Beethoven's Symphony No.5 - must be saved into its own playlist. Within WMP this is done by selecting the tracks, right-clicking and selecting
Add to > Additional Playlists...Once this is done, the new playlist will show up under My Playlists in the left hand pane of the Library. An accompanying playlist file (.WPL) is also created on disc.
Locate your playlist (*.WPL) files. By default they are in the
My Music\My Playlists folder. However if you have moved the destination folder for ripping tracks in WMP, then I suggest going to the menu, and checking the dialog
File > Save Now Playing List As... You can discover the parent folder for My Playlists by browsing the hierarchy in the dropdown box at the top.
Now, it would nice if I could just drag one playlist to another and have the option of retaining the dragged item as a nested playlist within the destination. That is to say, you could put a bag of music tracks into another bag of music tracks. This is not available: if you do drag one playlist to another, it simply "empties the bag" and your tracks are left "loose" with the other tracks.
To retain this "bag within a bag" structure, you will have to do a bit of simple editing of the playlist file. Open up the desired master-playlist (outer bag) using Notepad (right-click: Open With... Notepad). Make a backup copy of this playlist file first to play safe.
In Notepad, you'll see the list of tracks in a list like this:
<body>
<seq>
<media src="..\Artist1\Album1\01 Track1.wma"/>
<media src="..\Artist5\Album1\11 Track11.wma"/>
<media src="..\Artist3\Album1\20 Track20.wma"/>
<media src="..\Artist7\Album1\01 Track1.wma"/>
</seq>
</body>
You may see some cid= or tid= parameters specified after the track names. Don't worry about those here. To add our new set of tracks (the inner bag) is as easy as creating a new line in this list e.g.
<body>
<seq>
<media src="..\Artist1\Album1\01 Track1.wma"/>
<media src="..\Artist5\Album1\11 Track11.wma"/>
<media src="Beethoven-Symphony5.wpl"/> <media src="..\Artist3\Album1\20 Track20.wma"/>
<media src="..\Artist7\Album1\01 Track1.wma"/>
</seq>
</body>
You can see I've simply added the filename of the
Beethoven Symphony 5 tracks. Don't worry too much about where in the list as you can reorder it from within WMP.
Save the changes in Notepad. Close and reopen WMP.
Go to the master playlist entry in the WMP Library. You should see
an entry with a [+] next
to it that can be used to show the sub-entries. You now have a nested
playlist that can be moved like a single track, and which will be
shuffled as a single track.