Sort albums by last played ones

[Kundun]

Hi Folks,

I'm loving the app but there is just one feature that I'd love to see added: to sort albums by the last played ones. I know that there is a library category for "Recently played", but it displays just tracks (without the possibility to group them by album), and I know that it might makes sense for most of the users, but since I'm used to listen to full albums instead of single tracks that category is just too bloated to be usable for me.

[See below] (and on a similiar topic, I see that the app in certain aspects is very track-centric, like when from the player view "Artist" is selected from the menu, the next view is "All artist Songs", and not the "Albums" one, and another time, I know that it might make sense for most of the users, but can we have the possibility to select which view to open?)

Thank you for all your work, I'm not joking when I say that yours is probably the best android app that I've ever used.

[MotleyG]

15 minutes ago, Kundun said:

Hi Folks,

I'm loving the app but there is just one feature that I'd love to see added: to sort albums by the last played ones. I know that there is a library category for "Recently played", but it displays just tracks (without the possibility to group them by album), and I know that it might makes sense for most of the users, but since I'm used to listen to full album instead of single tracks that category is just too bloated to be usable for me.

(and on a similiar topic, I see that the app in certain aspects is very track-centric, like when from the player view "Artist" is selected from the menu, the next view is "All artist Songs", and not the "Albums" one, and another time, I know that it might make sense for most of the users, but can we have the possibility to select which view to open?)

Thank you for all your work, I'm not joking when I say that yours is probably the best android app that I've ever used.

In both cases you can sort your lists as you desire. Using the 3-dot menu when you open the Recently Played or Artist lists, you can choose to sort by album.

G

[Kundun]

3 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

In both cases you can sort your lists as you desire. Using the 3-dot menu when you open the Recently Played or Artist lists, you can choose to sort by album.

While it might be true for the artist view (even though I was talking more in terms of grouping, and not sorting), it isn't for the "Recently played" category, what I was talking about was to have a view with just the albums, and not the tracks (like the "Albums" library category), sorted by the lasted played albums. Practically speaking, it's a matter of adding a sort method to the albums library category, and since there is already an albums sorting method called "By date added to library", to have "By date played" or something in that line

[MotleyG]

I see what you mean about the grouping. Not sure if @maxmp has this as part of the plan but know he has mentioned that custom sorting is in the works for us.

There is an option in recently played to sort by last played time, it is way down the list but is there.

 

[Kundun]

Yes, "By last time played" is the default sorting method for the "Recently played" category, but as I said in OP that category displays only tracks, what I asked for is something like that but with albums instead. I've checked everywhere and as far as I seen something like that isn't acheivable with the current means

[andrewilley]

I guess one thing to think about is that PA's library is (by necessity) basically just a huge collection of song files. It is only the tag data within those files that allows them to be grouped into Albums, Genres, Artists, etc. Thus there while there is the firm concept of the time/date that a file was created or last-played, there is no real 'album' as such to hold the same information. So an album does not have a 'recently played' concept, only the songs that are attached to its name do, some of which may have been played more recently than others of course (especially if you ever use Shuffled playback).

Second, when you open an Artist's view, Poweramp knows the full list of all songs that are attributed to that artist, and also you can see which of those songs are assigned to an album - and some may not have any album details at all of course, such as Single releases. So when you drill down into an Artist, you do see all of their 'albums' - plus there's also a link to optionally take you to a full list of all of their songs too. But the albums list is the first level you see. 

Andre

[Kundun]

48 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I guess one thing to think about is that PA's library is (by necessity) basically just a huge collection of song files. It is only the tag data within those files that allows them to be grouped into Albums, Genres, Artists, etc. Thus there while there is the firm concept of the time/date that a file was created or last-played, there is no real 'album' as such to hold the same information. So an album does not have a 'recently played' concept, only the songs that are attached to its name do, some of which may have been played more recently than others of course (especially if you ever use Shuffled playback).

Theoretically speaking I agree on your line of thought, but since I haven't checked the codebase available on Github I don't know how the library is practically handled. Since an album is a collection of songs, and each song has a last time played value, the last time played value of an album isn't just the last time played of its last played song? (Sorry for the word blob) As I said above, isn't it just a matter of grouping?

48 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Second, when you open an Artist's view, Poweramp knows the full list of all songs that are attributed to that artist, and also you can see which of those songs are assigned to an album - and some may not have any album details at all of course, such as Single releases. So when you drill down into an Artist, you do see all of their 'albums' - plus there's also a link to optionally take you to a full list of all of their songs too. But the albums list is the first level you see.

In this case I was specifically talking about the case where the user select the "Artist" entry from the 3-dot menu in the player view, but I didn't realize that the Artist albums view is just one left-swipe away from the Full songs list one, completely my fault on that. (I'll strikethrough the related paragraph in OP)

[andrewilley]

6 hours ago, Kundun said:

Since an album is a collection of songs, and each song has a last time played value, the last time played value of an album isn't just the last time played of its last played song? 

That's not necessarily the last time a whole album was played though. For example, I often listen in All Songs Shuffle mode, so just a single random song within an album might be played - in amongst lots of others - and I wouldn't like to refer to that as a 'recently played album'.

Andre

[Kundun]

13 hours ago, andrewilley said:

That's not necessarily the last time a whole album was played though. For example, I often listen in All Songs Shuffle mode, so just a single random song within an album might be played - in amongst lots of others - and I wouldn't like to refer to that as a 'recently played album'.

Andre

I've never specified that the album has to be fully listened in order to be listed, that would surely need more logic to be implemented than the situation that I described above; I'm asking for it mainly because it's a feature that I've already seen in other players and it seems pretty feasible to be implemented

[null]

Actually I think this is a very reasonable feature, just like per track history… It's useful to keep track of the last albums you've listened to, even if the entry is triggered by a single track.

[Kundun]

I noticed that in the list options for any "songs" grouping (genre, artist, but most importantly albums) there is the "by time last played" option, so isn't the information about the last time played for each track already there?

To add a little bit of background on this and why this can make sense to be implemented: most of the time I listen to four or five albums during a fixed amount of time (let's say two weeks), and then I swap them with five more new albums, and I listen to those for the next two weeks, and so on and so on, and if you have a huge library to find those albums might not be that easy. I think that this way of listening to albums isn't that rare, and to have a albums list sorting by last time played can come in handy

[andrewilley]

14 minutes ago, Kundun said:

I noticed that in the list options for tracks in an album there is the "by time last played" option, so isn't the information about the last time played for each track already there?

Sorting songs by time-last-played is easy, but the question was about sorting albums by last-played status.

Andre

[Kundun]

(I edited my previous post just right before you posted your one)

Quote

Sorting songs by time-last-played is easy, but the question was about sorting albums by last-played status.

Yes, but again, what's the difference? The last time an album has been played is the last time a track of that album has been played, it isn't about if you listened to the whole thing. You can evaluate the situation basing on an already implemented one: when a track is played it is automatically added to the recently played library option (therefore its LTP value has to be updated in some way, or something on that line), but its value is updated even if you listen to the track for half a second, so it's never a matter of completeness, to recreate that sort of behavior for album too isn't a logical consequence? Of course to implement when an album is completely listened needs extra logic and data gathering, but I'm not referring to that situation, if the LTP value for each track is already there isn't it a matter of create a sorting method for the albums list view by just using the newest LTP track value for each album? I don't want to get too technical (because by the way I don't know the specific implementation) but I think that @maxmp can understand on a practical point of view what I'm referring to

 

[AVCPL]

On 5/21/2020 at 5:57 PM, andrewilley said:

Sorting songs by time-last-played is easy, but the question was about sorting albums by last-played status.

Andre

Is it possible to sort songs in a playlist by time-last-played?

If not I'd like that option as I have some pretty big playlists and just by the randomness of shuffle there will be songs that don't get played for a long time.

Unless there is some setting (that I'm not aware of) which preserves the order of shuffle even when I switch between shuffled playlists? (So I can just continue the shuffle when I get back to that playlist and not have songs repeat until all have played.)

[null]

9 minutes ago, AVCPL said:

Is it possible to sort songs in a playlist by time-last-played?

If not I'd like that option as I have some pretty big playlists and just by the randomness of shuffle there will be songs that don't get played for a long time.

Unless there is some setting (that I'm not aware of) which preserves the order of shuffle even when I switch between shuffled playlists? (So I can just continue the shuffle when I get back to that playlist and not have songs repeat until all have played.)

You can sort by a shuffle.

This shuffles the order of the tracks on the playlist, so they stay in that order everytime you go back.

[andrewilley]

9 minutes ago, AVCPL said:

Is it possible to sort songs in a playlist by time-last-played?

When you are viewing any given playlist in the Library view, tap the three-dots menu icon (top-right) and choose Re-Sort. Then from the resulting list of sorting options, choose By Time Last Played and the list will be updated based on your chosen order.

Andre 

[AVCPL]

3 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

When you are viewing any given playlist in the Library view, tap the three-dots menu icon (top-right) and choose Re-Sort. Then from the resulting list of sorting options, choose By Time Last Played and the list will be updated based on your chosen order.

Andre 

my god there is so much (awesome) stuff in this app that I still have no idea about.  thanks!! 

[Kundun]

For anyone interested in this topic, since I'm used to this sort of last played albums navigation a lot I tried to obtain a similar solution with the current means. First of all you have to set the Recently Played view to Grid - extra small in order to maximize the density of tracks on screen, what you get is a view like this one:

And after that it's just a matter of: :

• Selecting a track of the album that you're interested in
• Click on Info/Tags
• Click on the album field to get to the album view.

It's by no mean as straightforward and clean as the one suggested in the request, but since it seems that it won't be implemented in the near future, this is the quickest way to get something close to it for anyone interested in this case scenario. And with less straightforward and clean I mean in comparison to something like this (what I was thinking while I was writing the request):

[Kundun]

Any chance of seeing this implemented in the next 6 to 8 months? I saw that the development went in a little bit of an hiatus, maybe due to the extra effort being put in the equalizer app or Max having a well-deserved vacation, so I took a look at the API on github and this seems relatevely easy to implement (at least to some extent, a native implementation would be of course way less cumbersome). If this isn't planned to be implemented and since I consider it pretty vital to my listening experience maybe I'll try to implement it and release a FOSS app on github, and its apk on F-DROID if anyone is interested in it

[andrewilley]

Just to clarify, as this thread has meandered a little, what you want is an extra 'List Options' sort item in the Albums view, so you can sort albums (rather than just songs) in Last Played order. And the 'last played' value should be based on the most recently played individual track within an album (presumably a bit like 'Year' is interpreted at the moment).   

Andre

[Kundun]

33 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Just to clarify, as this thread has meandered a little, what you want is an extra 'List Options' sort item in the Albums view, so you can sort albums (rather than just songs) in Last Played order. And the 'last played' value should be based on the most recently played individual track within an album (presumably a bit like 'Year' is interpreted at the moment).   

Andre

Yes, exactly, it can be implemented in several ways but that seems the most straightforward one

(for instance, this behaviour is the default one in app like Google Play Music and others, and to be honest I probably shaped my listening habit for 4+ years of using it lol)

[hrolf1713]

As an "album-centered" listener for as long as I remember, I heavily support this request.

[Steverino]

I highly support this request.  I too am album-centric... there is not even an easy way to play two albums consecutively.

Poweramp's handling of album collections would be a much welcome improvement for me.

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, Steverino said:

 there is not even an easy way to play two albums consecutively.

PA will normally play the next album in whatever ordering system you have defined.

If you want to play several completely unrelated albums back to back, just long-press on the album title(s) and Add to Queue ( ">> Queue" icon ). Repeat with as many albums as you wish.

Andre