A Playlist is a list of dances that you intend to play at a particular session. You can make up a playlist in advance of a dance and save it to your disk, then retrieve it when you get to the dance and start playing. DM will let you move through the dances in your playlist in sequence by just clicking "Next In Program" on the Play screen. You can even set Auto-play on to have DanceMaster play the songs in your playlist without intervention. (You might use that to provide background music during intermission, for instance.)
There are two ways to add dances to your playlist:
| 1. | Put a checkmark (by clicking) in the little box in front of the dance name on the Select screen. You might filter your dance list to show just phase III dances, for instance, and check off a phase III assortment, then switch to filtering for phase IV dances and check off some more. |
| 2. | On the Play screen, you can click the "Add To Playlist" button to add the currently selected dance. |
Click the "Playlist" button on the left side of the screen, and the "Tonight's Program" screen will pop up, with your selected dances listed there. The red arrow on the left shows which dance DM considers to be "Next To Play".
You can rearrange the dances by clicking on one, then clicking the "Move Dance UP (or Down)" buttons. You might want to divide the program into "sections", such as pre-rounds and SD rounds, before / after intermission, etc. The "Add Mark" button will place a marker in the program just above the selected dance.
The "Save This Program" button will open a window where you can specify a name for this program file and a place (on your disk) to put it. If you choose to override the default location, be sure to remember where you put it - it will be embarrassing to not be able to find it when you get to the dance.
The Advanced Edition has a "Print This Program" button. Clicking that will give you the opportunity to, as you might expect, print the program. You can use the printed program in pre-dance publicity, or at the dance. You can also save the program to a disk file (click the "Export" button at the top left of the print preview screen). That way you can email a list of selected dances (the ones you are willing to cue) to someone who is programming a dance festival.
There is more information about the Playlist screen here.