Me!
Because, I read the documentation, figure things out and then promptly forget about just what it is, I figured out.
I lost all my big data disk recently, along with all my music and photos (and all my code and documents and books.)
The system called it Ironwolf.
So I bought a replacement, popped it in and restored the data.
I did not want to call this one Ironwolf, because I feel the name is jinxed. The old drive had always been flaky.
I wanted something stable, so that even if I did change it later, I could keep the same name to refer to the new one as well. So I have now very imaginatively christened it, Bigdisk.
That leaves me with the problem of changing hundreds of references from Ironwolf to Bigdisk in hundreds of places. Hopefully I have to do it just this once now.
And that brings us back to music and my beloved Quod Libet music player.
I got my song library back without much trouble, by pointing Quod Libet to the new disk.
But I lost all the playlists which I had painstakingly created.
Granted there were only about twenty something of them, but they’d be such a pain to recreate. And I started bemoaning the lack of iTunes-like smart playlists all over again. If only Quod Libet supported them!
On a lark, I decided to check the documentation.
Reading it scratched some old memory in my head.
Like I’ve seen this page before. I’ve done this before.
And lo and behold!
Quod Libet does support smart playlists.
And I had already created three of them, all those years ago!
I must have forgotten about them and then created manual playlists like a mad man.
Fifteen minutes of work, and I had all my playlists back. The search page really helped!
This should keep me from losing my playlists again 🤞
And now, so that I will not forget again; quoting verbatim from Quod Libet’s documentation page as of 2026-07-31:
Dynamic Playlists
You may wonder whether Quod Libet doesn’t have so-called “dynamic” or “smart” playlists as you may know them from other music players, that is, playlists that automatically update themselves for example to always contain all songs from a certain artist that you have in your library.
In fact, QL does have this functionality, but it is implemented via the search functionality and hence located in the search browser, not in the playlists browser.
Creating a dynamic playlist:
- Go to the search browser, (either using View or Music -> Browse Library).
- Enter what you want to search for (see the section about searching for QL’s powerful search options), for example artist = radiohead. Optionally, click on search to test your search and modify it until you’re happy.
- Click the arrow next to the search box on the right, to open the drop-down menu. You will see a history of some recent searches (if you have searched before), followed by Edit saved values… .” Clicking on this, you will be presented with a dialogue box. The Value field has been pre-filled with your current search. If you wish, enter a name in the Name field (if you leave it blank, QL will name it for you). Click Add.
You have now created a dynamic playlist, via a saved search. To play, just go to the search browser, click on the arrow to the right of the field and select your saved search from the list.
If you want to create several of such saved searches at once, you may find it more convenient to edit a text file instead of clicking through the GUI. To do so, you can edit the configuration text file
~/.quodlibet/lists/queries.saved.
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