A portable audio playing device implements a jukebox manager function to permit the simple generation of musical playlists and the alteration or editing of existing playlists. Data, such as MPEG-3 data or other conventional audio format data, may be readily downloaded into the system for storage in a solid state memory or in a spinning media device. The audio tracks are associated with one or more metatags that are used to describe the content of each track. The metatags and associated audio tracks are stored in a data structure that may be implemented as a database or other convenient data structure that readily permits searching by user-specified search terms. The user generates a new playlist by selecting one or more metatags corresponding to the desired musical tracks. The system queries the data structure using the user-specified metatags and automatically generates a playlist containing one or more audio tracks whose metatags correspond to the user-specified metatags. Alternatively, the system may perform the same query and simply generate a results list that will allow the user to manually specify which of the audio tracks identified by the search process will be added to the newly created playlist. The system also permits the simple editing of existing playlists. New audio tracks may be added in the manner described above using metatags for searching or maybe manually added from the list of stored audio tracks. The system readily supports different audio formats and different playlist types.