Create Mixed Music Albums

Learn how to create personalized, mixed music albums in ALSong. Click play to start the video. (Large screen version here.)

Creating ALSong Albums Script

Hello and welcome to the Creating ALSong Albums video tutorial.

ALSong albums are a fun and exciting way to visually present music in a complete album format.

You can simply drag & drop an album into ALSong to display it or select an album in the playlist and press ALT + 3.

To play songs in an ALSong album, just click a song you want.

Albums let you choose an album title, artwork, a description, album author, a link to a web site, and a playlist of whatever you like.

Album source code is completely customizable, so more advanced users with some HTML or design skills can create stunning albums where the only limits are those of your imagination.

This album is "The Starving Artists" by the Autumn Addicts, and is just 1 example of what you can do with ALSong albums. It's also available as a free download at the ALTools web site.

But it's time to get started now.

To create an album, click View, Create Album, or right-click and choose Create Album, or click on the [Create Album] button in the Playlist.

In the Create ALSong Album screen, you can choose to import your current playlist, add individual music files, add entire folders of music, or select files and remove them from your album.

For the sake of ease, I'll just add a single folder of music, but you can mix any number of music files however you like. You can use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to reorder songs as you like.

Next, type in an album title.

- The Starving Artists

Also type in an album author.

- The Autumn Addicts

In the URL input, type a web address for a web site. This can be your web site, the artists' web site, or any site you like.

Also type in a description or any text you like.

- Ear candy made from catchy rhythms & deep grooves to sweeten your ears.

The last things to choose are a theme, images, background color, and font.

Before we get to those, let's click preview to see some of the themes because they'll affect your remaining choices.

The "Default Theme" uses two relatively small images.

The "Image Theme" uses 1 very large image, and a smaller one.

The "CD Jacket Theme" is quite large and uses two large images just like a regular CD jacket.

Some themes allow you to change the default size. To do that, uncheck the "Use default size" checkbox and type in a new size.

As we already saw, there are default images provided if you don't already have some. But most often you'll probably want to use album art or photos from your digital camera.

If your photos are too big, or you'd like to edit them you can use ALSee to quickly resize them and make other edits.

Click the browse button to select a picture, then choose from Stretch, Tile, or Center for how to display the image.

While the default theme doesn't actually use the background color, the Image Theme does, and the CD Jacket uses it as a border. I'll quickly select a random color, choose the Image Theme, and Preview. You can see the background color here. And in the CD Jacket... The background color is this border color.

I'll set it back to white, and move on to choosing fonts.

Uncheck the "Use defaults" checkbox then click the T button to display your font options.

Item let's you choose which element in the album you want to customize. The available options are Album Title, Description, Playlist, and Author. For each of these, you can choose a Font, Font Size, Font Style, and a Font Color.

Beneath you'll find a Font Settings Preview.

I'll only change the Album Title a little, but you can customize Fonts as much as you like.

Advanced users can make source code changes by clicking the View Source button. After you've created an album, you can still edit the HTML by opening the ALSong album SAB file in ALZip and editing the files in there.

Everything is filled in now, so once you're finished, click preview to make sure that you're happy, then click the Create Album button to create it.

Your album is now done, and you can drag & drop it into ALSong, save it to a USB key, burn it to a CD, or upload it to your personal web storage space.

I hope you've enjoyed this little video on creating albums in ALSong. Make sure to drop by the ALTools to download some free music from the Autumn Addicts and Kimo Watanabe.