Author Topic: Add 'Complete Albums' as a criterion for limiting autoplaylists  (Read 13959 times)

ngwoo

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Hello everyone, I've recently migrated to MusicBee from Mediamonkey, and I'm finding it quite sleek so far.

Basically, as it stands, we can limit autoplaylists to x albums chosen by y, but there is no option to make it use complete albums. This is a feature that was later added to Mediamonkey by scripters as it was useful for making playlists that gave you a certain number of full albums randomly. (ie, make a playlist such as "10 Random Complete Albums" that simply gives you 10 random albums out of your library)

Attempting to make something similar now just gives me 10 tracks from 10 different albums.

If it would be possible to implement this (or tell me some kind of trick to produce the same results - perhaps with the AutoDJ as I haven't explored it very much) I'd be grateful. Thanks.

Sarge

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Hey ngwoo........welcome !

I'm a former monkey'er also , you're going to really like it here.

sogarth

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I'd like to add my vote to this as well, although my use case is a little bit different. I made autoplaylists with the sort order as "Random Album", which guaranteed that complete albums would be pulled into the playlist, which was really nice.

Skoops

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I'd like to see this as well.  This sort of auto-playlist creation was the main way I created lists of music to send to my MP3 player in MediaMonkey, and it feels really limiting to not have something similar in MusicBee.  The "limit to xx albums selected by random" restriction seems pretty useless with its current implementation.


beeing good

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I would also really like to see this feature, I used it a lot in mediamonkey when I didn't know to listen to. It's a nice feature as it sometimes brings up something that you would not have otherwise thought of to play.

cartman005

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How does this script define a complete album? For example, what if you only have one or two songs from an album in your library?

Anti

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I don't know how the mediamonkey script works, but I'd make the following proposal for how to implement it in musicbee.

At the moment in autoplaylists, we have the 'restrictions' section:



IMO, all that's needed is an option added to the dropdown list so we could choose the restriction:

limit to N albums selected by album

The new 'album' option (in bold) would choose a seed track from the source and rules specified in the other section of the auto-playlist dialogue. It would then look up all tracks in the database that have the same album tag as the seed track, and add all of them to the now playing list (using track# for sort order). Depending on the number of albums (N) specified, it would then repeat the process by choosing another seed track.

The main problem is how to identify incomplete albums containing only two or three songs. If you didn't want these to be included, there are currently several ways of doing it:

· Using the rule: album track count > 8 as an include rule
· Making a 'white list' of full albums in a static playlist and using it in an include rule
· Making a 'blacklist' of partial albums in a static playlist and using it in an exclude rule
· Creating a custom tag 'partial album' and using it in an exclude rule
· Using the album rating tag where 'no rating' = partial album and using an exclude rule
etc

These are the normal kinds of things you have to do with when creating auto-playlists anyway, so I'd suggest that it shouldn't be up to MBee to have to automagically determine between whole and partial albums; it should be up to the user to devise a system within their tagging strategy.

I'd welcome comments and other ideas about how to best implement this.
Our ideas might give Steven some inspiration!?
Last Edit: July 10, 2011, 12:59:52 PM by Anti


Steven

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this is done for the next update.
I have added a new input field in the playlist editor: group by = track (default) or album
when set to album, for any matching tracks, the complete album is always returned in the result set. By default the tracks in the album are grouped together and sorted by track, but sorting can be overriden in the main panel

Anti

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Wow... that's great Steven! Can't wait to test it out.
Thanks so much.

Steven

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i will leave it a few days to get some feedback from the bitmap skinning changes first before releasing this change

Steven

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http://www.mediafire.com/?e4a8gkl6emb232x

keep a copy of your current MusicBee.exe as it contains some relatively untested code for bitmap skinning (should be ok though)

aidanw

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I'm unsure how to get this to work... so if I wanted a playlist "Albums only", what filter do I use?
I was expecting a "Complete album" = true field or similar but I've probably read this wrong