How to set up music playlists on your Lumia

It is one of the greatest debates in popular music: Would The Beatles’ White Album be better as a single LP? Plus, when did you last listen to Revolution 9 in its entirety, anyway?
I love Liverpool’s Fab Four as much as the next man, but even they are not immune from the mighty power of the playlist phenomenon.

Digital music has made it possible for us to select our favourite songs from our favourite artists, programme a collection of songs to suit a particular mood and, yes, even to remove tracks and play with the running order of classic albums.

Setting up playlists with Zune

It is possible to create playlists on your Lumia handset, without your PC but I would advise against this. Doing it with Zune on your PC is much more flexible. This is especially true if you have a large collection of music – it will just be easier to pick out the songs you want.

First you will need to create the playlist on Zune before synchronising it to your Lumia.

Open Zune on your PC
Go to your Collection, where all your music, videos, photos and podcasts are stored
On the right-hand side of the screen, underneath the Search box, select Playlists
This is where you will be creating new and editing your existing playlists
To create a new one, press ‘New Playlist’ – this is towards the bottom left of the screen
Give the playlist a name, such as ‘Exercise Music’ or whatever you want to call it and click OK.
Now that the playlist has been created, you now need to add tracks, delete tracks and synchronise the playlists to your Lumia smartphone.

Adding/removing songs to the playlist

Songs are added to the playlist back from the Artists screen and there are two easy ways you can do it. Note, that you can add individual songs or whole albums or an entire artist’s collection to a playlist.

The first method is by dragging a song, album or artist to the playlist icon in the bottom left of the screen – this is the black sheet of paper with three white lines across it.

The second way to add tracks to a playlist is to right click on an artist, album or song and select ‘add to playlist’ from the menu that appears.

If you have more than one playlist, then you will need to select which playlist you want to add the song or songs to – this is why it is important to remember the name of your playlists.

If you are dragging and dropping the songs onto the black playlist icon, then the choice of your different playlists will appear if you hover over it for an instant.

Removing songs from a playlist is also easy to do. Select the playlist so you can see all the songs that you’ve added to it. Right-click on the song you wish to remove, and select ‘remove from playlist.’

If you wish to delete or rename a playlist, right-click on the name of the playlist and those options will appear.

Synchronise your playlist to your Lumia

Finally, we want to get your playlist on your Lumia so you can enjoy those tunes on your smartphone.

Connect your Lumia to your PC with the USB cable
Then, just like how you sync pictures to your phone, just drag each playlist that you want to synchronise to the phone icon in the bottom right corner.

Any songs that were not already on your phone will also be synced together with the playlist.

To access the playlist on your Lumia, just open Music & Videos > Music and then swipe across until you see the playlists screen.

Playlists are a really nice feature and offer much more than just a bespoke listening experience. You can also send a playlist to a friend or create your own CDs with a playlist.

With a playlist, you can also judge for yourself whether you think The White Album would have been better off without Revolution 9, Rocky Raccoon, Piggies, Yer Blues… For the record, though, I love it just the way it is.