EDITING PLAYLISTS

Playlists displayed in the Playlist Detail display of the Playlist Editor can be edited on an individual track basis. With just one or two mouse clicks you can add, delete, replace, drag and drop, copy or paste tracks anywhere you desire in the playlist.

Edit Status Displays and Playlist info displays
When the contents of the current playlist have been changed or edited in any way, the phrase “UNSAVED EDIT” will appear in red text under the “Playlist Detail” title. This indicates that the playlist has changed but not yet been saved.

Whenever the “Unsaved Edit” indicator is displayed, a red asterisk also appears on the icon of the “Save List” button to indicate the current version of the playlist has not yet been saved.

When the new changes to the playlist have been saved to disk, these indicators will disappear.

Also, any time a playlist edit takes place, the “# of Tracks” and “Total Time” fields for the playlist will also be automatically recalculated and refreshed to reflect the changes.

Creating a New Playlist
To create a new playlist from scratch, click the “New Playlist” button near the top of the Playlist Editor tool.  

If the currently displayed playlist has been edited but not saved when you click the “New Playlist” button, Harbor will pop up a warning message indicating that your changes have not been saved, and give you a chance to correct this situation if you wish. 

When you create the new playlist, the name field of the Playlist Detail display will say “New playlist…”.  You do not actually assign an actual filename for the playlist until you save the new playlist file to disk.

The track information will show a blank track #1. Right-click on this empty track to pop up the edit options menu. In this case the only option available will be the “New Track” option.

Select the “New Track” option to add the first track to your new playlist.  

Moving Tracks via Drag and Drop
The easiest way to move tracks around within the playlist is via the “drag and drop” method. You can click and drag any track in the playlist to any position in the playlist, and drop it on top of another track to insert the dragged track into that position. 

For example, if you drag a song from track 5 onto track 3, the dragged song gets inserted into track 3. The song that was at track 3 gets moved to track 4, and the song that was at track 4 fills in the newly blank spot in track 5.

Dragging and Dropping Into the Playlist Editor
Audio files can also be added anywhere in the playlist by dragging and dropping files from Windows Explorer or other applications, or from a File Detail view in the DB Viewer.

If a list of files is dragged from Explorer into the playlist – i.e. if more than one file was selected in Explorer when the drag was started – Harbor will drop the first file into the group and ignore the rest of the list.

Pop Up Editing
If you need to do more than just move an existing track from one position to another, just right-click on the track you wish to edit to pop up a simple menu of editing choices.

This menu gives you options for adding or inserting new tracks into the playlist, replacing the audio file in the current track with a new one, copying the current track to Harbor’s “clipboard” for later pasting into this or other playlists, and deleting the clicked track entry from the playlist. 

Only those edit options which are relevant to the current click will be active; irrelevant options will be grayed out.  For example, the Paste option will be inactive and grayed out unless or until track information has been copied to the clipboard via the “Copy” command.

“Add/Insert” – Use this option to add a new track to the playlist by inserting the new track into the current playlist at the clicked position. Any tracks on and below the clicked position will be moved down one position to make room for the inserted one.

Clicking this edit option will pop up a standard file dialog box for browsing and selecting the audio file you wish to add to the playlist.

 “Replace” – This option works exactly like the “Add/Insert” option, except rather than inserting the new track into the playlist, it will overwrite the information in the clicked track with the information for the newly selected audio file.

“Copy” – Clicking on the “Copy” edit option does not itself perform any editing upon the playlist, but instead copies all the track information for the clicked track to an invisible “clipboard”.

Copying track information to the clipboard activates the “Paste” edit option, allowing you to paste another copy of the information into another track of this playlist (if you want that audio file to play more than once in the playlist), or even to paste that track into an entirely different playlist later on.

NOTE:  The “clipboard” for this copy and paste edit stores only one track’s worth of information. If you copy second track into a clipboard already holding another track’s information, the first tracks info will be discarded and replaced by the new copy. 

“Paste” – This edit option inserts the track info copied to the clipboard from a “Copy” edit command into the clicked position. Any tracks on and below the clicked position will be moved down one position to make room for the inserted one.

Tracks can be pasted from the clipboard regardless of which playlist the copied information came from. This allows you to copy tracks from one playlist to another.

“Delete” – Deletes the clicked track entry from the playlist.  Any tracks existing below the deleted track will be moved up one in the playlist to fill the gap.

This option deletes only the track entry itself; it does not delete the actual audio file associated with the playlist track entry.

Saving an Edited Playlist
To save the edited playlist to disk, click the “Save Playlist” button at the top of the window to pop up a standard file dialog box in which you can choose the drive, folder and filename under which to save the playlist file.

This dialog box will by default display the drive and folder in which the currently displayed playlist is located.

You can save the playlist under its original name or under a new name as a separate playlist file. If you save it as a new file, Harbor will instantly add it to your inventory database and update the name of the playlist file at the top of the Playlist Detail display. 

Whenever an edited playlist is saved to disk, both the “UNSAVED EDIT” indicator on the Playlist Detail display and the red asterisk on the “Save Playlist” button will disappear, indicating that a copy of the currently displayed playlist is on file.

Deleting Playlists
If you wish to delete the currently displayed playlist, click the “Delete Playlist” button at the top of the window.

NOTE:  Deleting a playlist not only removes the playlist from your inventory, but also deletes the playlist file from your system completely.