Song tagging and playlists based on tags
Martix
Member
It's been a long time dream of me to be able to quickly generate playlists based on some made up tags I manually assigned to the songs, for example, happy songs, or songs sung in french, or whatever, and importantly, a song would be able to hold multiple tags.
I know I can hack similar behaviour by overwriting the genre of the songs, but I don't want to lose the genre,artist,album info and even so, that would not allow a song to have multiple tags.
I'm also aware that simulating this in the current interface is quite possible, I'd just have to create a playlist of all happy songs, and another of all french songs, and each time I'd sync new songs I'd also add them to the corresponding playlists. But this is quite cumbersome process, and the playlist editting in the web app is not quick enough (open playlist, add songs to it, save as same playlist, repeat), there's no context menu or other quick way to say add this song to x,y, and z playlists. That's why it seems to me that supporting tags would be more elegant solution.
Apologies if this is a dumb request or if there's already a way to do it that I'm unaware of. I'm not sure how feasible it would be given that astiga needs to support so many different file extensions. Feel free to put the request in the freezer if it's too futuristic. :)
Comments
Are you saying the playlist would be dynamic (a playlist that plays all songs with a tag "Christmas", so would vary over time) or static (search for all songs with a tag Christmas, add them to the playlist, save the playlist. The playlist never changes.)?
I was thinking more like these temporary unsaved playlists that are created when you play an album or something. For example check these mock-up screenshots I made. You'd be able to browse all tags in a menu, and when you click any of them, it would open a screen with all songs that have that tag assigned, and there you could press the + button to add the songs to the current playlist.
I imagine tags functioning in much the same way genres function right now, with the only exception being that each song should be able to have any number of these tags on it, and they should be editable in astiga.
Thanks very much for the mock-ups - I'll think about this some more next week.
Oh, ok. So it's not so much about saving playlists, more about giving more access to "tags" that are stored on songs/albums/artists/whatever and then being able to add to the play queue from there?
Yes, that's exactly right.
Now that I think some more about your initial feedback, there's another way to go about it. It's somewhat less powerful than implementing tags, but could potentially be easier to add to astiga without having to create entirely new data field. I could just use playlists instead of tags if there was way to easier edit them from within the songs interface. For example I'd create an empty playlist for each tag I want to make, and then add the songs to each relevant playlist. Right now in each songs page (or album, or search results page, or whatever) next to each song there's a small "+" button that adds it to the currently playing queue. If that button could also function as a "save to playlist", that would help simulate the tags I imagined.
For example check the way youtube does it:
Notice how it's multiselect so you can easily add to / remove from multiple playlists saving you many clicks compared to how you'd do the same operation in astiga now.
If something similar can be implemented, I imagine it would make editing playlists that much easier.
Tags still have some upsides over simply using playlists. I imagine they could be used as a search term, so I could search Christmas and get as a results all songs I added to the christmas tag. Creating a mixed playlist of multiple tags also sounds tempting and I don't believe there's an easy way to merge playlists in astiga now. Now that I think of it, a "+" button for playlists would also be a nice feature (as opposed to always overwriting "currently playing" when opening a saved playlist).
I agree having a "add to playlist" feature on songs would be an easier way of implementing this.
Now that I think of it, a "+" button for playlists would also be a nice feature (as opposed to always overwriting "currently playing" when opening a saved playlist).
Do you mean: "add all songs in this playlist to [another] playlist"?
Yes, "add all songs in this playlist to [another] playlist", or even "add all songs in this playlist to the currently playing queue, without removing what was in there"
Gotcha 👍️
add all songs in this playlist to the currently playing queue, without removing what was in there
@Martix We added this in the latest build: https://community.asti.ga/discussion/comment/2414/#Comment_2414
Thank you, I tested it and it's actually useful when I want to listen to several playlists mixed together. Very good feature!
👍🏼