Add and Edit a Playlist - Beginner
Introduction
A playlist is a special type of presentation that is designed to be used inside another presentation. Where a regular presentation displays a fixed layout on your player, a playlist lets you rotate through multiple slides automatically within a designated area — so you can show more content without changing the surrounding design.
Think of it as a zone within your presentation that cycles through content on its own, while everything else — your logo, clock, branding — stays exactly where it is.
Creating a Playlist
- Go to Playlists in the left-hand menu.
- Click + Add Playlist in the upper-right corner.
- In the Create New Playlist dialog, fill in the following:
- Name — give your playlist a descriptive name so it is easy to find later.
- Group — choose which group the playlist should belong to. If you are just getting started, Standard is fine.
- Aspect Ratio — choose the ratio that matches your content. As a general rule, use 16:9 for landscape content and 9:16 for portrait content. Note that playlists are automatically scaled to fit the Playlist app when used in a presentation.
- Click Create Playlist.
Your playlist will now open in the editor.
The Playlist Editor
Once your playlist is created, you will land in the editor. This is where you build and manage your slides.
On the left you have the Apps panel, where you can add content to your slides — images, text, videos, and much more. To learn how to add apps to your slides and work with their settings, see the Working with Apps in Q-Play guide.
On the right you have Slide settings, where you can configure each slide individually:
- Select media — set a background image for the slide.
- Background color — set a background color for the slide.
- Slide duration — how long this slide is shown before moving to the next. The default is 10 seconds, which we generally recommend as a good balance.
- Time schedule — schedule a slide to only appear at specific times or dates. See the Time Schedule guide for details.
To add more slides, click + Add slide in the slide strip at the bottom of the editor.
Playlists are always published
Unlike presentations, a playlist does not have a manual publish step. Any changes you make to a playlist are automatically pushed to your players within approximately 30 seconds. Keep this in mind when editing a live playlist.
Adding your Playlist to a Presentation
Once your playlist is ready, you add it to a presentation using the Playlist app. The playlist will then rotate through its slides automatically within the area you place it in the layout.
Follow the guide below to add your playlist to a presentation:
Guide: How to add a Playlist App in Q-Play
Tip: if the Playlist app in your presentation is an unusual size that does not match a standard aspect ratio — like a wide banner or a tall sidebar — follow these steps to make sure your playlist fits perfectly:
- Place and resize the Playlist app in your presentation first. Then open the Advanced section in the app settings, enable Pixel editing, and note the Size [px] values shown there.
- When creating your playlist, click Unlocked next to Dimensions to unlock the aspect ratio, and type in the exact pixel values from step 1.
- If you need to create multiple playlists at the same size, use the Save as option to save your custom dimensions — that way you can select them directly next time without repeating the process.
This ensures the playlist fits its zone perfectly and prevents the playlist background color from bleeding around the edges.
A note on Playback mode
When adding your playlist to a presentation, you will see a Playback mode setting in the Playlist app. How you configure this depends on your setup:
One playlist — leave Playback mode set to Change slide at content end. This ensures the playlist plays through all of its slides before the presentation moves on to its next slide.
Two or more playlists in the same app — set Playback mode to Pause and restart playback on each playlist. This makes each playlist loop its own content independently instead of trying to advance the presentation when it finishes. You should also set the presentation slide duration to -1 (infinite), so the presentation never tries to move to the next slide on its own — otherwise both playlists will restart every time the slide duration runs out, regardless of where they are in their content.
Multi-slide presentation with a fixed time per slide — if your presentation has multiple slides and each slide only shows the playlist for a limited time (for example 15 seconds on slide 1, 20 seconds on slide 2), use Pause and resume playback. This means the playlist will continue from where it left off each time the presentation cycles back to that slide, rather than starting over. This is useful when your playlist has more content than can be shown in a single time slot, and you want the full playlist to be seen gradually over multiple rotations.
Scheduling a playlist within a presentation
If you have added multiple playlists to the same Playlist app, you can set a start and end date for each one by clicking the gear icon next to it. This is useful for time-limited campaigns — for example, showing a Christmas playlist only in December. For recurring schedules (such as every Monday), set the schedule on the individual slides inside the playlist instead.
Next steps
Now that you know how to create and use a playlist, learn how to use playlists to make your static content more dynamic: