Author Topic: Show all tracks OMITTED by Auto-Playlist  (Read 4650 times)

skipsy

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 38
Auto playlists are a great feature but the only problem is, you can't quite be sure of which tracks you might have unintentionally omitted by the rules you set. It would therefore be extremely useful (and presumably quite easy) to have a button or menu item allowing you to show all tracks that have been omitted by your rules.

This way you can scan the 'omitted' list and try to spot if there are tracks you would have liked to include.

This will help you to tweak the rules so the auto-playlist reflects your intentions better.

================

[ I searched through the MB forum wishlist and couldn't find this idea in any other thread ]


phred

  • Global Moderator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 9305
Unless I'm misunderstanding the request, this makes no sense to me. I've got in excess of 37,000 tracks. No way in hell do I want to see a list of tracks that have been omitted from my auto-playlists if I have to look through the entire library.

Please explain how this would work.

Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

----------
The FAQ
The Wiki
Posting screenshots is here
Searching the forum with Google is  here

mrbenn

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 167
Do you mean the inverse of any given auto-playlist? So if you had 1000 files and your rules get 501, you'd want the other 499 in another playlist of some kind?


skipsy

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 38
mrbenn is sort-of correct - In his scenario I do want to identify the other 499 tracks, but not because I want to create another playlist from them.


I too have in excess of 30,000 tracks and as the library grows, the problem increases. It's great to be able to create a smart list that might, for example, filter the library down to about 10,000 tracks which are then randomly played. This is great for digging deep into the library and plucking out random tracks that you wouldn't often think of playing when you create a manual playlist.

But when you put together a set of rules, the more creative you get with these rules, the harder it is to know what you might be eliminating. So from the 20,000 excluded tracks there might be whole groupings that have been excluded unintentionally - The point is, you'll never know what's been excluded because all you can see is a long list of the 10,000 'successful' tracks.


I know from experience that if I had the chance to flick through some of the excluded tracks I would very quickly find some that I would rather have kept in the playlist. Looking at any one of these tracks would make you think again about what rule had excluded it (and other tracks like it), and you would quickly realise how to tweak the rules to accommodate any changes.

You would then check the list of exclusions again...and after a couple more iterations of this process you should be able to get the rules pretty close to perfect.



The thing is, this would not be a difficult feature to add. The work has already been done, we have auto-playlists already. I just want to be able to flip backwards at the press of a button and see what I might be excluding.

Just to be clear, if all you want to do with your smart playlist is, say, "Find all tracks in the 'Blues' genre with rating higher than 3 stars" then this feature will never be needed. But some of my auto-playlists have more than a dozen rules and at that level it's really difficult to calculate in your head exactly what the effect will be on every individual one of those 30,000+ tracks.



mrbenn

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 167
my way of doing something like that is:

create autoplaylist based on basic rules
do additional searches manually, and eyeball which tracks are not in a playlist
adjust rules to accommodate and/or resolve tagging as required

at this point you can create a 2nd list which has something like
Code
<Playlist> Is Not [name of playlist] 
as its rule

another way could be to add a rule to your auto playlist based on which playlist a track is in (or not in) vs its path on disk etc - I've never quite got this to work as there doesn't seem to be a way of a rule having a different effect when a track is in a playlist vs more than one playlist (so certain playlists/folders of playlists can be ignored).

frankz

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 3834

at this point you can create a 2nd list which has something like
Code
<Playlist> Is Not [name of playlist] 
as its rule

Yes, this is exactly the functionality that OP requested.

skipsy

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 38
Thank you for the suggestions, it's good to know that it is at least possible to uncover the tracks that are being omitted by a playlist. However this is still rather cumbersome - If I have 15 auto-playlists already, it means creating another 15 just to help me tweak the first 15.

It seems to me it would be a very simple thing (and apologies to Steven if I'm taking your work for granted here) to add an item to the drop-down menu that says "Show all omitted tracks."

This would enable me to tweak the playlist on the fly, or to turn up any tracks that may have been mis-tagged in the first place, without having to create 2 separate playlists every time.

frankz

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 3834
"It seems to me it would be a very simple thing" to have one auto-playlist set up for this purpose and change the referenced playlist to whichever playlist you want to investigate at any given time. You're presumably not going to be working on tweaking the rules for all 15 simultaneously.


skipsy

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 38
This does appear to work - Although I found you have to first go to the settings for the original playlist and untick the box for limiting the number of tracks (then re-set again afterwards).