Classical, Composer and SmartLists

[NicholasT]

Hi,

My music library is mostly classical music and so I need to be able to browse by Composer > Album. That's my bare minimum requirement for a player and I'm not sure that Poweramp fills that need for me?

I would also really like to be able to create smart playlists that can use inclusion/exclusion logic on any tag.  E.g., WHERE Genre='Classical Piano' AND Period='Romantic' and then group the results by Composer, Artist or Album etc. But, I think I'm dreaming on that one? 

Is Poweramp for me or should I look at other options?

Cheers,

Nicholas

 

[w3wilkes]

I don't think Poweramp will do what you want. I've not seen a Android music player that has that much smarts. The closest thing I've seen to this is a music server app called Logitech Media Server (LMS). It has versions that run on MacOS, Windows and Linux, but not Android or iOS.

[flyingdutchman]

First of all, is your music properly tagged? Eg mp3 artist, album tags are available?. Secondly, my app will not only create Poweramp playlist but also offers a query tool "smart playlists" that does exactly what you are looking for. Links in signature

[andrewilley]

Customisable library category sorting/grouping is sometime I have been asked for for a long time now, as it would solve most of the common requests for multi-category sorting levels, etc. 

Andre

[Marko]

I too listen mostly to classical music. My workaround is to create a separate folder for each composer, and a subfolder for each album. I can then use the folders hierarchy to select what I'd like to listen to.

[andrewilley]

Folder mode is always available for those who want very specific control of the music nesting hierarchy, and you can name your folders and files however you like to ensure the browsing and sorting process works exactly the way you want it to. That's how I use PA 90% of the time.

The original question of being able to browse by Composer then Album is already provided in the app of course, using the 'Composers' library category. There are various sorting options, but not filtering as yet.

In case you weren't aware, 'Composers' is now a splitable tag, which means that you can have several different composers for one piece of music and PA will display them separately under each different name rather than only as a whole grouped entity. For example, you could have a song "Waterloo" with the composers listed as "Benny Andersson ; Björn Ulvaeus ; Stig Anderson". If the split mode is enabled, PA would show the song in the Composers category separately under the entries for "Benny Andersson", "Björn Ulvaeus" and "Stig Anderson". For more information, see https://forum.powerampapp.com/kb/en_us/faq/guide-tags-embedded-metadata-albums-and-cue-sheets-r39/

Andre