Smart album playlist behaviour when you click an album

I know that regarding consistency it somewhat makes sense that in all playlists, if you click an item, that item will be played (actually the whole playlist is loaded and playback jumps to the clicked item).

But with smart album playlists I am surprised by that behaviour every time. I expect to see the album detail view when clicking on an album - probably because I use the smart album playlist like I use genres. So the smart album playlist is more like a folder/container to me, not really a playlist where I want to play all albums continuously.

I know that a single album can be played through the three dots menu, and that is somewhat sufficient for what I want to do. Still I wanted to pick up the discussion, maybe someone else experiences the same thing :wink:

Long press drag and drop, once you start using that you can’t stop. And there’s a go to album in the 3 dots too if needed.

Yes, I use drag and drop too rarely, that is true.

It is not that there is not enough options to play a single album, it is more that when I see a list f albums, I expect a certain behaviour. But then again that is me. If it would be to my liking, then you would have to add a menu item for “play from here”, which is inconsistent and probably even more confusing for most users.

Clicking an albums is actually a play from here you just ignore what’s queued before and won’t be played anyway.

This is a playlist, you can load the exact same filter in the album list and it will behave exactly as you expect. You are not using the correct tool, let’s not try to change the tool to adapt and then become 2 different but same but different tools :wink:

Yes I agree. Still let me explain my point, maybe you have more good ideas :slight_smile:

Usually I go (1) Genres → (2) Genre X → (3) Artists → (4) Artist X → (5) Albums. The albums are sorted by year. I (6) select whatever album I want to play.

For classical or soundtrack albums, I go (1) Genres → (2) Genre Y → (3) Albums (because the artist is not so relevant here). But then again, the albums are sorted by year, while in this case I would like to have it sorted by title (which is (4) (5) another two clicks, and later again two clicks to reset that for all other genres).

So I made a smart album playlist filtering the genre and sorting by title. So now I go (1) Playlists → (2) that playlist and already have the right list of albums to choose from in the right order. I only have to remember not to click the album, but to (3) drag/drop it or use the menu and (4) click play. This is the shortest route, but it still differs from my normal navigation pattern.

If I used the filter I had to go (1) All albums → (2) Filter → (3) Load → (4) The filter → (5) One click for the filter window to go away and then I still have to (6) (7) change the sorting, because the filter obviously will not remember the sorting. So this is the longest route, it deviates from my pattern, and I have to change back the sorting later.

Basically the issue comes back from the fact the sorting of album lists is global and cannot be stored by list, but we discussed that already and it is clear to me that that cannot be implemented.

As there are actually enough options to go for me, I think this is also a clear wont-implement :smile_cat:

Yes it’s a quite specific issue, specially when in the end clicking the album with actually play it like you want. It just add too much to the playlist but IMO it’s a minor inconvenience at this point in the grand scheme of things and keeping the app simple enough.