Full album vs. singles playlist

[aidanw]

Not sure if this is a Wish or just a "I don't know how to do this", but sometimes I'd like to only play full albums. And I'd like this to be playlist-able.
I guess the way this is determined could be:
1) more than 5 (configurable) tracks with same Album name
2) more than Album Total Tracks minus 2 to allow for intros/outros etc, i.e. if Album Total Tracks = 10 then if 8 tracks are found it's a full album
3) a manual flag set in a field
4) Identify all Singles (how?) and say "all music" except where in playlist "Singles"

Any ideas? MediaMonkey has a field "# of Tracks" for an album which you can use to get info from. But I like and use MusicBee, not MM

[Steven]

you achieved what you wanted just by using the Track Count property in MM ?
Its very easy for me to expose that property in the auto-playlists and queries but cant think at the moment how you could that would allow an easy way to play a full album

[V4lve]

This has always bothered me and not easy to achieve at all. I would really like to be able to define albums properly but it seems to me concepts available to us in tagging schemes that are used generally to represent album are rather vague and not that useful.

I.e.

1. The "name" of the "album" that a track belongs to.  This is pretty week because "name" is not unique.
2. The "track number" on the "album".  This combination is a bit stronger but relies on good tagging and of course an album may have many releases, each with different track numbers, numbers of tracks and different tracks.
3. The album art.  This is reasonably unique but difficult to use as it would software to be able to recognise the graphical uniqueness of a specific album cover.  And of course a cover for a specific album could be different depending on year, country etc etc.

IMHO the only really way to introduce the concept of album is to add a new entity and allow the user to assign it manually or use some combination of the above to work it out automatically.

[Steven]

the way MB currently groups albums (in the artwork and album and tracks view) is by:
album name, album artist and optionally also year

and to play an album there is already right click on a track/ Play More/ Play Album Now which will play all the tracks with the same album name/ album artist (and year if set in the preferences)

[V4lve]

So the way to make sure albums are managed properly is to use proper values in "Album" and "Album Artist" and "Year"?

[Steven]

yes, although Year is optional

fish, you can also queue the album using the Play More/ Album command

[V4lve]

Ta.  So I think part of what Fish is asking for is for is some way of determining (and perhaps presenting) how "complete"  an album is.

[aidanw]

@V4lve - yep you're right, I'm asking for someway of determining whether the song is part of a complete album or not.

Maybe if i give a couple of scenarios where I'd use this it may help?

- Playing music by searching in the top-right free text search box: I don't always want to listen to random singles or fragments of albums where I've only purchased one song. I want to listen to whole albums sometimes, and have a way to filter out the random little one-song from whole album bits.
e.g. I search for "U2" and they have so many albums that invariably I've got 1 or 2 songs from a lot of random albums. But I just want to listen to the two complete albums I have e.g Joshua Tree and How to dismantle.

- Syncing to a mobile device: If I've added lots of new music to the library recently, it's often half whole albums ripped from CD I've just bought and the other half is randomly bought tracks. I'd like to only sync the albums to my phone since the 8GB does fill up quickly, and not only that, but the mobile device can be a bit of a pain to flick through the "Artists" or "Albums" list if it's got heaps of Albums that aren't actually full Albums but just represent a single song.
So ideally I'd have some way of creating a playlist that is "Albums only" and then use that to filter what gets sync'd.

I'm not so sure a Grouping is the best way as that sounds if it would require manual application of that to indicate Albums.
Ideally an automatic way would be best.. I don't really know.

A way to achieve the two scenarios above would be to have a field "# of Tracks".
I would create a playlist that would be "Albums only" and set "# of Tracks" to be 5 or above. Obviously this would not indicate whether the album was "complete" per se, as the whole album might have 20 songs and only the first 6 were ripped. But it would give a starting point that probably would cover 90% of the cases.

[Steven]

there is already an input field for the number of tracks on a disc. Its currently not enabled in the auto-playlists as a crtieria field but could easily be added.
But i suspect you are asking for something where MB automatically counts the number of tracks you actually have in an album - is that right?

[aidanw]

@steven, that's it, some way for MB to automagically count the tracks in an album. I'd expect a library refresh to trigger this too probably