An alternative approach for handling playlists

[a5cent]

@Pirx

Sorry, but I don’t have a clear YES or NO for you.

Let me summarize it.

Con:

• playlist visibility in the album view will depend on the content of the album-artist field in the music files

Remark
I gave it a try filled the album-artist field in a few songs (with “playlist”) and found this “playlist” in the artist view. The songs are ordered according to the song numbers they have in their albums and I haven’t found a proper way to change that. I wander what to do to get a song in a second playlist (the album-artist field can contain just one value). I know what I did is not exactly the same you want to do. Just to set a value in the album-artist field will obviously not do the job. There must be more than that.

Thoughts
Any solution must be easy to use.

Change the place to store playlists and if desired create subfolders there should every user be able to manage without a lot of explanations.

Using the album-artist field in the music files adds complexity. Users might want to use this field otherwise. Songs would disappear from the playlist in the album view if the album-artist field is cleared later for any reason, whereas they remain in the stored playlist.

Cheers
Pirx

Okay, I’ve had to put this on hold. I would like to return to it, but right now I’m holding off until I can get my other issues with Volumio sorted out. In my view Volumio has huge potential, but it’s just not quite ready yet. If my other issues get sorted then I would love to come back to this, and hopefully do a better job at explaining how this is intended to work, as so far I’ve failed at that

@Prix
You’re right about the PRO’s, but mistaken about the CON’s.

I understand what you’re trying to test, but right now it’s impossible to test what I’m proposing, because it’s currently impossible for one audio file to be associated with two different albums.

Even if it were possible to associate one audio file with two different albums, my proposal wouldn’t require you to change ANY of the metadata for ANY of your tracks. In fact, you shouldn’t. Rather than modify metadata, you’d just add a playlist. Assume the following:

You have this playlist:                "Joe's Scary Music.m3u"
The third track in that playlist is:   "Revolution #9" (by The Beatles)

The playlist is stored in a folder which Volumio scans for music.

Now, when you do tell Volumio to scan/update, and the enhanced importer encounters that playlist, that is when a second album is created! The enhanced importer would import all the same metadata from the audio file just as it did the first time, except for the following differences:

album-name    =  [playlist file name], e.g. "Joe's Scary Music"
album-artist  =  [an arbitrary name the user can specify in a configuration file], e.g. "Joe"
track-number  =  [based on the sequence/order of tracks as specified in playlist file]
album-art     =  [The image file stored in the same folder as the playlist file]

At this point you would effectively have one audio file associated with two albums. The database used to store all the metadata would contain the same track twice, like so:

track-name     album-artist  album-name			track #	
-------------  ------------  -----------------  -------
Revolution #9  The Beatles   The White Album    12
Revolution #9  Joe           Joe's Scary Music  03

Looking at each album, you’d find the same track in both albums, with a different track #, but clicking on either would play the same audio file.

If you delete the playlist and tell volumio to scan/update, then the second track would be removed from your collection.

IMHO that’s exactly how you’d want a playlist to work. I don’t think this adds any complexity at all.