I’d love the ability to create playlists of albums, for example: If I create a “Best Albums of the 1970’s” playlist, and add ten albums, currently I can only view the playlist as a long list of songs.
I would love the ability to view that playlist as distinct albums, and sort them however I wish. I’m aware I can create Smart Album playlists, but I’d like the ability to do this without setting up rules, etc.
Problem solved:
Currently, users cannot create playlists of albums and view them easily as collections. If I want to make a playlist called “My favorite albums of 2021”, I want to see them all arranged in a grid view so I can easily select one. Rather than a giant list of songs.
Brought benefits:
Currently, Symphonium is the most user-customizable app I have seen in terms of how it can be configured to display a user’s music collection. Yet this feature is missing! It would allow Symphonium to continue to be the most customizable app.
Other application solutions:
“Doppler”, for iOS, implements this beautifully, but it is far, far more limited than Symphonium in basically every way.
Additional description and context:
I have uploaded screenshots of how the app “Doppler” implements this feature on its iOS app. It is called “Collections”, which would be an amazing addition to symphonium, but really all I’m after is the ability to view playlists as organized by album.
Thank you for your reply. Respectfully, the feature I’m requesting is the ability to select an album and add it to a Playlist. Then, from within that playlist, I want the album to be displayed in grid mode as one singular unit, rather than as a list of its songs.
Currently, creating a Smart Album playlist requires me to set certain parameters and my albums will be “Auto-filled” according to these parameters. But I cannot then add albums, individually, to this playlist once created, without modifying the parameters to potentially include albums I do not want in the playlist.
Further, if I want to exclude certain albums, I have to figure out a way to translate my exclusions into a formula which can be expressed within the parameters of a Smart Album Playlist.
For example, let’s say I want to create an Album Playlist of “My Favorite Albums from 2010 - 2019”. So I first add rules to include albums from those years. Then, I suppose I could create a rule regarding rating and rate the albums I want as five stars, but doing that would require me to individually edit tag information on those albums and go through them one by one and rate them. If I decide later, eh, “Boys and Girls in America” by the Hold Steady isn’t truly a “favorite” album from that era, I would have to somehow edit the rating for the album instead of simply deleting it from the list. Etc.
It gets even more complicated if I want to create a collection of albums that don’t really share any attributes other than ones that are significant to me personally. Like if I want to create a “Favorite Bedtime Album” mix, how to begin creating rules to filter in the albums I want? I could tag them with “Mood: Bedtime” I guess, but then the same issue arises.
It would be so much more convenient and exciting to be able to simply select the albums I want in a collection and then delete the ones I don’t want. This is a feature that I have not seen implemented anywhere in the Android music app space and would further distinguish your amazing app!
That already works - you can use the three dots menu for an album and “Add to playlist”. That adds all album tracks to a normal (non-smart) playlist. So you can add or remove albums manually without creating crazy filter rules.
What does not work is display the songs in the playlist grouped by album, showing only one entry per album. But you can sort the list by album (or keep the manual order which will keep the songs in the order you added them, and as you added them per album they will still be together per album). It is easy to remove whole albums then by holding the first song and dragging over all subsequent songs of this album, marking them all, and then using the trashcan icon of the popup action menu.
Smart playlist for those kind of playlists will always be the proper solution as automatic management by rules.
But in all case as said it was discussed here a couple of times, the way to achieve that via smart playlists is just to add your albums to a normal playlist then in the album smart playlist use the in playlist filter.
And it is even enough to add only one song per album to the (non-smart) “management playlist”,and the “in playlist” filter of the smart album playlist will add the whole album.
Is this approach supposed to keep the albums in the order of the “in playlist”?
I have a playlist in LMS that includes albums contained in Rolling Stone’s 2020 “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”. I’ve added tracks to the playlist according to their position in the survey, and when I import the playlist from LMS everything looks fine. However, if I create a Smart playlist of that playlist the albums appear out of order, even though I’ve chosen Default as the sort order.
If they should appear in order then I’ll create a new topic and submit my logs.
If the playlist is the only source then I don’t understand why it couldn’t use the original track order.
This functionality (In Playlist as a source for Smart Album playlists) was suggested as an alternative to BubbleUPnP’s Album view, but I’ve just noticed that it pulls the full album even if only a single track is in the playlist, so it’s actually not comparable at all - not that it matters too much for my playlists.
I’ll create a new support ticket as ordering is critical in playlists.
