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Visual Playlist Editor

The Visual Playlist Editor (VPLE) allows you to easily construct new datasets for your system. You simply add the layers, PIPs, title, and other settings that you want and when you save the dataset, everything you referenced is saved into a single folder along with an automatically generated playlist.sos file.

When creating a new dataset, make sure to specify only a subcategory. The major category will automatically be site-custom. If you forget to specify a subcategory for a dataset, then it will be put into an uncategorized subcategory in the site-custom category. You may also wish to include keywords and creator for your site-custom dataset, which will also be added to the SOS Data Catalog entry for your dataset as well. You can also add a description to your playlist.sos file that will show up on the iPad and the SOS kiosk.

When you use the VPLE to modify datasets in your presentation playlist, changes you make to the datasets will affect only the presentation playlist that you are editing and not the underlying playlist.sos files for each dataset. The playlist.sos file is the master copy of how the dataset is displayed and should not be edited in any of the NOAA-supplied datasets (the VPLE prevents that, by default). If you make changes in the playlist.sos files, the changes will appear in everyone’s playlists and weekly NOAA dataset updates may overwrite your changes.