How To Create A Music Folder

How to Automatically Make Playlists From MP3 Files in a Folder

What's the easiest and most convenient way to automatically create playlists for a pile of MP3s all located in the same folder?

Services like Spotify and Google Play Music are making people less reliant on locally-saved music files, but if you're like most people, you still have some music stored on and played from hard drives.

Sadly, organizing music on hard drives can be difficult and a hassle, especially if you have thousands of tracks that need to be correctly tagged with the right metadata. Making playlists out of those tracks can also be headache.

Let's say you have a mix of MP3s shoved in a random folder somewhere in the depths of your computer. How do you create a playlist out of those tracks as quickly and efficiently as possible?

How to Make Playlists From MP3 Files in a Folder

You need to use a music manager with an auto-playlist feature, and we recommend using MediaMonkey. While iTunes offers the same functionality, we all know it's a bloated mess that's difficult to make usable again.

Here's how to automatically create a playlist of MP3 files in one folder:

Open the MediaMonkey app.
Go to Edit > New AutoPlaylist.
Set up one rule with the desired folder as the music source.
Save the playlist.

Whenever you add a new MP3 file to the source folder, the playlist will automatically update itself to reflect the changes. You can export your playlist to another music app, but it will no longer be "smart" (i.e. it won't update itself when you add new MP3s into the source folder).

This feature is only available in MediaMonkey Gold. If you'd rather not pay for MediaMonkey Gold, you may be able to achieve similar results using one of these free music players, but MediaMonkey is definitely the easiest and most convenient way to do it.

On the subject of managing MP3 files, if you want to split or merge them, use these audio editor tools:

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