Virtual albums

[wwarren]

A feature I’ve always wished for with jukebox apps is what I’d call a “virtual album.” Its basically identical to a playlist, but would show up in an album listing instead of the playlist listing and some of the id3 info would be ignored.

For example, if I already own a bunch of the early CDs by The Eagles, I could put songs from each of those into a virtual album and create my own “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album. To do that now, I’d have to either duplicate those files and edit the id3 tags, or make a playlist. But a playlist is segregated from the rest of the artists albums, and the original tag information will appear. A “virtual album” would ignore the track number and album name of the files being used in favor of the virtual album song order and name.

[rpedde]

@wwarren wrote:

A feature I’ve always wished for with jukebox apps is what I’d call a “virtual album.” Its basically identical to a playlist, but would show up in an album listing instead of the playlist listing and some of the id3 info would be ignored.

For example, if I already own a bunch of the early CDs by The Eagles, I could put songs from each of those into a virtual album and create my own “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album. To do that now, I’d have to either duplicate those files and edit the id3 tags, or make a playlist. But a playlist is segregated from the rest of the artists albums, and the original tag information will appear. A “virtual album” would ignore the track number and album name of the files being used in favor of the virtual album song order and name.

I kind of like that idea. I’m not sure what the best way to implement that would be though… I’d have to think on that.

[fizze]

Yes, this seems intriguing to me too 🙂

Forging an album in the DB isnt too hard, but figuring out a way to make this manageable for the user is, me thinks.

What about an option for smart-playlists to be come “smart-albums” ?

[rpedde]

@fizze wrote:

Yes, this seems intriguing to me too 🙂

Forging an album in the DB isnt too hard, but figuring out a way to make this manageable for the user is, me thinks.

What about an option for smart-playlists to be come “smart-albums” ?

Ya, it would almost have to be something like that, except you might want custom metadata for some or all of the items. Not sure how you would express that, really. Even if I know, say the ids of the songs I wanted on it, and I wanted the album to be called “Best of the Eagles” or something, how would I express that in a file or something?

I’m not sure what the configuration file for something like that would be, which would be the hard part.

[fizze]

Well first things first. 😉

Of course duplicating the songs and forcing the album with the smart playlist name would be a dirty hack. But I guess one that could work.

edit:
Oh, and that would have to be taken care of at every scan. Actually that would happen right after the scan, actually. 8)

[rpedde]

@fizze wrote:

Well first things first. 😉

Of course duplicating the songs and forcing the album with the smart playlist name would be a dirty hack. But I guess one that could work.

edit:
Oh, and that would have to be taken care of at every scan. Actually that would happen right after the scan, actually. 8)

Keeping it in the db is the easy part. If I know what metadata needs changed, and I know what the ids of the songs that I want referenced, I can easily dummy up the song info in the db.

How to let the server know to do that is the hard part — the config file, or however you would let the server know to do that is the part I’m not sure about.

[fizze]

Well, Id introduce a new playlist type.
As in playlists with type = 2 are those “smart albums” 😉

Editing the smart playlist wizard to set another type should be a rather easy part.
Now adding some extra logic to the file scanner that actually doubles up the songs, and justs changes the album name to whatever the smart-playlist name is should be doable.
But you probably want to remember which songs that are, otherwise your library will grow one extra smart album every scan, which is a bad thing.

There is an awful lot of fields in the songs table, but I guess some are better than others.
I dont know about the use of songs.grouping, maybe you can use that field to store the id of the smart-album-playlist that it’s created from, that way you could join from the songs and the playlist to really only get new items, or flush old ones out.

0.02€

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