This is largely a cross-post of ideas from this thread in the General forum.

The original request from Oli:

Is it possible when searching for a tune, to play that tune, then play the rest of the album where the track came from, starting from the next track in order.

Either that, or use search to jump to a track in the full playlist.

Also, to display the track number of a tune, relative to it's original position on the CD, not it's position in the playlist.

(I seem to be stuck with the Album/Track mentality mainly because most of my albums are mixed, and so shuffle sounds horrible... maybe it'll wear off after a while )


What Oli and others are getting at is the fact that while the Empeg frees us from the idea of having to switch CD's and think in an album-only mentality, sometimes, you just want to hear the album. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. So why can't the Empeg pretend to be a CD changer if we want it to?

How would this work? Well others will chime in, but here's my idea. Let's say you're shuffling through your tracks and "Mother" by Pink Floyd, which is track 6 on Disc 1 of The Wall, comes on. You think "wow, I haven't listened to The Wall in at least 3 or 4 days, I'd like to hear the rest of the album." What can you currently do with the Empeg as-is?

1. Browse manually to a pre-made album playlist for that album. Slow, tedious to maintain, not ideal.
2. Hit the "Tweak Source" button 20+ times. Unfortunately, your tracks probably won't be anywhere near in correct order. And if you weren't shuffling your entire player's contents, you won't get any "hits" with this feature. Slow, unreliable, not ideal.
3. Hit the search button several times to bring up a Source search. Unfortunately, similiarly-named albums (I have four albums named "Play" in my collection, for instance) will confuse this strategy. Furthermore, if you have your Source field filled out such that multi-disc albums like The Wall contain "Disc 1", "Disc 2", etc. you will have to do a search for each of these albums individually. Slow, unreliable, not ideal.

So what can be done? Well, right now, the player only has two constructs to organize music: Playlists and Metadata. As far as the Empeg is concerned, your "album" (Source field) is just another piece of metadata which is blindly matched in searches. You're not really grouping songs within a certain album, you're assigning a certain text string to each song which is indexed to give the appearance of belonging to an album. Duplicate "primary keys" so to speak break this, and typing in a search string is no small task in the car.

So Oli's idea (which may have been suggested before) is that it'd be sweet if you could hit a button, and your current playlist would remain intact, but it would automatically insert all of the tracks from the current song's album.

I would add to this that it would be real nice if it also added the *previous* songs from that album *before* the current song. So in my above example, when I hit this magic button, tracks 1 through 5 of The Wall Disc 1 are inserted before this track, and tracks 7 through 13 are inserted afterwards. Furthermore, in my dream scenario, all 13 tracks from Disc 2 would be added as well, because they're part of the same album. So if I wanted to browse back a few tracks in that album, I could do that (or start from the beginning.)

The way I would implement this if I had Emplode and player source code in front of me would be thus:

1. Introduce the concept of an album to the player's database format. Each track would belong to an album, not just have a Source field. The albums wouldn't have to be named, I'd just use a unique ID number for them internally.
2. Create a UI in Emplode in which songs can be selected and added to these albums. Possibly just by designating an album playlist as, well, an album playlist. Possibly by drag-and-dropping them into some list of album entries, but I don't like that as much as the album playlist idea.
3. Each track within that album would have a reference to the album in the database, which would in turn have references to each of the album's tracks (sorted.)
4. When listening to the track and you want to hear the album, the player just cross-references the track to the album, and tweaks the order with the album's contents.

So who else thinks this would work? Let's hear ideas, let's hear criticisms of this idea, let's hear it all. At some point I'd like to hear from Peter, Roger, Hugo and the gang on whether this idea is (a) good (b) feasable and (c) possible for a post 2.0 release.

I hope I managed to collect all the ideas from the original thread amongst my own ideas... If anyone from the original thread feels their idea got lost in my translation, please chime in.

Whew. My fingers hurt.

Let's say you're shuffling through your tracks and "Mother" by Pink Floyd, which is track 6 on Disc 1 of The Wall, comes on. You think "wow, I haven't listened to The Wall in at least 3 or 4 days, I'd like to hear the rest of the album." What can you currently do with the Empeg as-is?

I press the 0 button on the remote control, and the rest of The Wall plays.

What's the problem?

What Oli was asking for was a different thing than the scenario you described.

Let's say that I had a playlist that was comprised of big AOR hits (which I will vehemently and correctly deny that I actually have) and I had that playing and set to shuffle. It hits ``Comfortably Numb''. I think ``Boy, I'd like to listen to the rest of ``The Wall'''' (another thing unlikely to happen). Describe the steps to go about making that happen. Feel free to assume that ``Comfortably Numb'' exists as the same track in another playlist that is ``The Wall''.

Think outside the box Tony. What you do (and I do it too) is to duplicate (in a random fashion) the entire contents of the player into a temporary second database (the playing list) which can be manipultaed by some simple commands, including the tweak as well as unshuffle. However, forget about shuffling the entire player for a second.

What Oli wants supercedes the requirement to shuffle your player. What Tony (ynot) described does as well. It can be used to achieve what Oli requested, yet it is more precise because it doesn't rely on the playlist structure, but metadata.

I don't know if I would incorporate the functionality in the exact way described above, nor if I'd use the same terminology, but I do very much like the idea behind the discussion.

At any point, while listening to a song, I think it would be cool to call up "tweaks" or "Source Album" - this would ADD/INSERT those songs into my current playing list (instead of relying on them already being there as is now the case).

Bruno

Unshuffle... And if you're in a mood playlist or any other subset of your collection which doesn't happen to contain all of the tracks from that album, in order? It "unshuffles" that playlist instead of playing the album.

Anyone who thinks unshuffle is an ideal way to do this must do nothing but listen to their entire root playlist. If that were the only legitimate way to listen to tracks, why not save on the overhead of having searches, tweak buttons, etc. in the first place?

I know that Oli was mainly talking about compilations but my scenario and his would both be addressed by this suggestion. Can you please comment on the feature suggestion itself instead of my admittedly hastily thrown together hypothetical scenario? And try to remember that not everyone goes "down down down" to play their music.

The great thing about the Empeg is that you can kind of drift in between different groupings of music at a whim, and I think the feature I'm describing would add another level to this. Unless you're shuffling your entire collection, you have no duplicate album names, and you have no compilation albums, tweak by source is useless.

I don't know if I would incorporate the functionality in the exact way described above, nor if I'd use the same terminology, but I do very much like the idea behind the discussion.

Good! I don't want people to agree with me, I want to hear new ideas on how this might be achieved in the best way possible for everyone who cares to comment. I threw those ideas together just to get the discussion started. How would you like it to work?

You're misunderstanding my post. I didn't say it wasn't a good idea for a feature, I was simply stating that the example scenario stated by _ynot was not appropriate for the feature.

Your example, Bitt, is a better one.

I was simply stating that the example scenario stated by _ynot was not appropriate for the feature.

And that's wrong, my scenario was appropriate for the feature, but it's not the *exact* scenario that Ori had in mind. The same feature takes care of both my desire to listen to the rest of an album when you're not shuffling your entire player and Ori's desire to listen to the rest of a mix/compilation CD without knowing which album to search for. It does it with one (theoretical) button, too, instead of having to search. Unshuffle is one button, but again, it relies on the assumption you have a running order that contains the entire contents of your player.

Plus (not mentioned previously) you have to go shuffle again once you're done with that album, and that can lead to it shuffling in songs you JUST heard (this has certainly happened to me, as recently as today at work.)

Others have discussed the merits of having a "tweak by album" feature; I'll take it as given and look at the mechanics of implementing it.

In reply to:

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1. Introduce the concept of an album to the player's database format. Each track would belong to an album, not just have a Source field. The albums wouldn't have to be named, I'd just use a unique ID number for them internally.
2. Create a UI in Emplode in which songs can be selected and added to these albums. Possibly just by designating an album playlist as, well, an album playlist. Possibly by drag-and-dropping them into some list of album entries, but I don't like that as much as the album playlist idea.
3. Each track within that album would have a reference to the album in the database, which would in turn have references to each of the album's tracks (sorted.)
4. When listening to the track and you want to hear the album, the player just cross-references the track to the album, and tweaks the order with the album's contents.

---

I think we can do this without having to change the database format, as follows. Define an album as "a playlist that has the same name as the Source field of track in question." That's not a perfect definition, of course. But if we extend the definition to constrain the result to be "the playlist that has the same name as the Source field of track in question and most closely contains the track," we can deal with the majority of cases. (If such a playlist doesn't exist, I guess we should just say "no match".)

This definition deals neatly with albums like Black Sabbath, which in my setup is a child playlist of Black Sabbath (the band), as the album is a closer ancestor than the artist. I expect this is true for most people. It also deals with albums like The Wall (for those who have separate Side 1 etc. sub-playlists) and ELO's Out Of The Blue (for those who make a sub-playlist for the Concerto For A Rainy Day).

OTOH, it does seem wrong to constrain playlist layout, even in such a tiny way. So it might be nice to have an "options" flag to indicate that a playlist is to be considered an album for all tracks whose Source field matches.

The source -> playlist name mapping is an interesting idea. But there's a lot of gray areas and ways that it could be broken, especially with a definition like "most closely contains" a track. I know what you mean but I wonder how the code might look for such a thing... But it's certainly simpler than creating a new structure in the database... I think I like it...

I was throwing out ideas, rather than a fully-formed solution. I hope no-one implements my random musings without thinking about it a bit more!

It also occurred to me that we get a choice of doing this at database build time or on the fly as a search. (another unconsidered random idea to throw into the brainstorm pot...)

Now, what about a checkbox next to the source saying "Album" . if you check it then you can use the "album" features that could be added to the HOLD-DOWN-BUTTON on playlists. These features could be "play album from current song", "play album from fist album song" "play album randomly". And these three extra functions would be visible only it the song's source IS an album (checkbox checked)

That's another way to do it, but I like the one button approach rather than clouding up the hold down button which is already populated with "insert, append, replace" and the like. Plus this is an operation that isn't really related to any particular playlist, it's related to the song that you're currently playing.

Or am I misunderstanding your idea???

No, at all, I agree that the one button apporach would be better, generally speaking. I just thought it was the easiest way to implement. So I may change my proposal like this: still add the checkbox at the "source" in emplode, but then add the "play album" options somewhere else?

i dont make mood playlist.. becuase its messed up that feture.. i set pin numbers to mood.. "420" for certain situations and "311" for rock

Hmm... I wonder what mood the "420" playlist is for.............

I bet there's a lot of Grateful Dead in it though...

The album ID# in the db is the best idea so far for actually tracking a song's album grouping. There should be no having to rely on comparisons of tags to playlist titles. As has been mentioned many times, the player doesn't have a concept of a "playlist" by name when accessing a track.

The tricky part is how to implement the ability in emplode to quickly create these tags. I'd be fine with just selecting a bunch of playlists and clicking one option to assign unique IDs to the songs. Each ID# to represent an album. And it would choose songs that existed together at the same playlist level. Performing this function on some playlists would not be desirable. But it would work fine on ones you already had grouped by album.

But, this is really only necessary to prevent mis-grouping tracks that have the same source defined. Or to be able to package together songs that have different source tags. Otherwise the player could implement the feature using the source tag itself obviously.

Anyway, I'll re-read this again soon and offer some more constructive input. Keep this one alive. It's useful.

Bruno

I thought of a cool tag to share space with this one. Since you're likely to have more than 255 albums, this will need more than one byte. Since you're likely NOT to have more than 65k, it can use less than 16bits. So, how about setting aside a few bits for a Media-Type ID?

Then you can identify whether something is an "Album" or a "CD-Single" or "8-Track" or "Live Bootleg" or "Audio-Book" etc... This would then allow filtering the soup views. So if you want to look only at CD-Singles, you can. I would find this VERY useful. And I don't even have any audio books yet...

Bruno