Playlists

Managing Playlists

Playlists can be created, edited, and deleted from the web UI’s Playlist Editor page. The editor provides drag-and-drop song ordering and a searchable list of available songs.

The all_songs playlist is always present and auto-generated from the song repository, sorted alphabetically. It cannot be deleted or manually edited.

Active Playlist

The active playlist determines which songs are available for playback. Switch between playlists using:

• The dashboard playlist dropdown in the web UI
• The playlist editor’s Activate button
• The SwitchToPlaylist gRPC RPC
• MIDI/OSC Playlist and AllSongs events

The active playlist choice is persisted in mtrack.yaml (via the active_playlist field) and restored on restart. Switching to all_songs is session-only — on restart, the player returns to the last persisted playlist.

Song Deletion

When a song is deleted from the repository, it is automatically removed from all playlist files on disk to prevent broken references.

Playlist File Format

Playlists are YAML files stored in a playlists/ directory (configurable via playlists_dir in mtrack.yaml). Each playlist is named after its filename stem — my_setlist.yaml becomes the playlist “my_setlist”.

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kind: playlist
songs:
- Sound check
- A really cool song
- Another cool song
- The slow one
- A really fast one
- Outro tape

Song names must match the name field in each song’s song.yaml.

Legacy Playlist

For backward compatibility, mtrack also supports a single legacy playlist.yaml file (specified via command line or the playlist field in mtrack.yaml). This is loaded as the playlist named “playlist” if no file with that name exists in the playlists/ directory.

If no playlist file is provided at all, mtrack falls back to the all_songs playlist.