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Static and Auto Playlists

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[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

There are two types of playlists:

  • Static playlists, which include specific media items
  • Auto playlists, which search the library every time they are opened and may contain different media items at different times. An auto playlist is the result of a database query.

To import a static playlist from a metafile, first call Player.newPlaylist to create a Playlist object based on the data in the metafile, and then pass that object to PlaylistCollection.importPlaylist to add the playlist to the library.

To import an auto playlist from a metafile, use MediaCollection.add. For more information, see Playlists and the MediaCollection Object.

To import a static playlist from an auto playlist metafile, use Player.newPlaylist and PlaylistCollection.importPlaylist as described earlier. The auto playlist will be executed once and a static playlist will be created based on the result of that execution.

Using an auto playlist to query the user's library is not supported for webpages that users access over the Internet.

The following C# example code demonstrates importing an auto playlist metafile as a static playlist. To run this sample, create an auto playlist by using the library user interface, and then include the correct path to the auto playlist metafile in this code.

private void addStaticPlaylist()
{
    IWMPPlaylist pList;

    pList = Player.newPlaylist("NewImportedList", "\\\\myServer\\myPath\\artistcollection.wpl");
    if (pList.count == 0)
        MessageBox.Show("The specified playlist is empty.");
    else
        Player.playlistCollection.importPlaylist(pList);
}

Managing Playlists