Skip selected tracks (memorized per-folder)

[Animae Gray]

Hi, as someone who's almost always listening to whole albums and sorts the music via folders, being able to skip certain tracks in the album (folder, rather) would be immensely useful.

Say, you don't particularly like (or you've listened to them too much and you're tired of them) tracks 3, 6 and 7. Just select those, hit skip, and that's it, the player will automatically skip those tracks.

It should also be permanent, otherwise you'd go crazy selecting multiple tracks to skip each time you want to listen to that specific album. I know I can use playlists for this, but that's the whole point - I don't want to always select a whole bunch of songs and then it messes up the navigation because I always sort my music via folders, so I navigate through the folder structure.

Select the tracks you want to skip and press skip:

The playlist indicates in some way that these tracks are going to be skipped now:

[maxmp]

@Animae Gray nice idea (to have sort of "disable" toggle per track), thanks for the request!

Should those tracks be added to playlists/queue? If so, should they be kept as "disabled"?

[Animae Gray]

1 hour ago, maxmp said:

Should those tracks be added to playlists/queue? If so, should they be kept as "disabled"?

Hmm, I don't really use playlists or queue myself, but logically I think they should be added and kept as disabled. If someone went to trouble to manually mark tracks as "disabled" in the album's folder, it stands to reason that this choice should be remembered when you add the album to a playlist or queue. Also, adding them to a playlist will make re-enabling them later much easier because otherwise you'd have to manually add them which is a hassle.

 

But it does introduce edge cases, like what if you add a whole bunch of albums to a playlist and half the tracks in those folders are disabled, so the playlist is a bit of an eyesore now with all those disabled tracks. The problem is that it's a great idea for albums because there aren't a lot of tracks in an album, but for people who like using long playlists it can be a bit of an issue.

 

Though then again, if you're one who uses playlists you'll be adding a bunch of tracks to a playlist manually. If you don't want to listen to a track then you just won't add it in the first place. This skipping feature is relevant to those who like to listen to entire albums but perhaps want to skip a track or two. So there's not really a lot of clash between these two use cases, not that I can see at least.

 

The other way around - disabling tracks in a playlist should definitely not apply to folders, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because a playlist is already a curated subset.

 

I don't know, it could be solved by a toggle option like "ignore disabled tracks when adding to playlist", as well as a toggle option "hide disabled tracks in playlist" to take care of the case where you have too many disabled tracks in a playlist for some reason.

 

Haha, this is how it always works, you think of a simple feature, but turns out it has a whole bunch of edge cases and consequences. Anyway, I'd be really happy to see even a very simple implementation that works strictly in folders with no connection whatsoever to playlists/queues if implementing this extra stuff proves too cumbersome. Like I've said, I think this feature will be the most useful to people who like to listen to whole albums and want to skip a track or two, whereas people who use playlists will likely use playlists to manually select the tracks they want to listen to, so they have less of a need for this kind of automatic track skipping (they already chose the tracks they want, after all).

[andrewilley]

Personally, if I don't ever want to hear a track again, I delete it.

But possibly something could be done much more easily and elegantly with the existing ratings system though? A simple option to auto-skip any song that's rated rated below a certain value - e.g. don't play 1-star, or thumbs-down, songs.

I think that would be a far more logical and intuitive way to achieve what you want, and easily reversible per song too. Could even flag any such songs as temporarily greyed-out in Category views, playlists, etc whenever that option is currently active.

Andre

[MotleyG]

52 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

But possibly something could be done much more easily and elegantly with the existing ratings system though? A simple option to auto-skip any song that's rated rated below a certain value - e.g. don't play 1-star, or thumbs-down, songs.

This is starting to look more and more like an option for a “Smart” playlist. Perhaps since that is already on the wish list, it can just get bumped again? To make this work, can just choose to have most files get one or more stars, and the ones you want to ignore can have no rating at all.

[andrewilley]

8 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

This is starting to look more and more like an option for a “Smart” playlist. 

Not really, that would be a whole other thing, with a lot more programming.

This request seems to be to flag a song or songs so they are simply skipped whenever you happen to play their album, or their folder, or a playlist they are in, etc. No need to create a new list of any kind, it would just trigger automatically and jump to the next track every time a particular song is encountered during normal playback. And I think a simple setting to auto-skip 1-star songs would do that perfectly. 

Andre

[Animae Gray]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

Personally, if I don't ever want to hear a track again, I delete it.

That's what I usually do to most bonus tracks and covers, but the main problem for me is that some songs are way more memorable than others and I don't want to overlisten to them, so I usually end up skipping those on occasion. Similarly, I might not be in the mood for some songs, like if there's a slow ballad in the middle of the album or something like that I might want to skip it. Lots of different situations where you might want to skip a track sometimes, but not always.

 

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

A simple option to auto-skip any song that's rated rated below a certain value - e.g. don't play 1-star, or thumbs-down, songs.

The problem is if you use media file tags for this you might run into people who rate their audio files and their 1-star rating might not mean "skip the song" for them.

 

In principle, since Poweramp seems to use a library database to access the audio files, it should be as easy as adding an extra property to audio files in that database. No need to alter the files themselves.

[andrewilley]

10 minutes ago, Animae Gray said:

The problem is if you use media file tags for this you might run into people who rate their audio files and their 1-star rating might not mean "skip the song" for them.

Then they wouldn't turn such a feature on, it would clearly be optional. What better reason for skipping a song could there be than giving it a 1-star rating?

Ratings in PA are only internal by the way, they are not written to files.

Andre

[ihaspei]

4 hours ago, MotleyG said:

This is starting to look more and more like an option for a “Smart” playlist

i mean, it would be nice to have a "smart" playlist or a "radio mode", where you play a song from your library and the next tracks are related to the track you picked, like same genre, same decade, same artist.

or some kind of mix of 40 songs with the same idea as the "radio mode" where it follows same decade or same genre.

maybe it's hard to programming it, but i think it's possible to do and would be a really good feature, especially for people with a large library

[andrewilley]

@ihaspei Oh I agree Smart Playlists would be a great idea - for example I'd love to be able to use simple wildcards in a playlist, which would get resolved at playback time, such as playing the current contents of a whole folder, artist, etc. Smart Playlists are already mentioned in the Frequently Requested Features List:

• Smart / Dynamic Playlists (support for wildcards in folder/filenames in M3U playlists, auto-filtering, and updating of lists ' on the fly' by pre-defined criteria) [ LINK1  LINK2  LINK3 ]

But that isn't really related to this Feature Request, which is for an option to just skip specific songs whenever they are encountered within regular category playback. Please continue Smart Playlist discussions in one of the other existing threads. Thanks.

Andre

[MotleyG]

14 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Not really, that would be a whole other thing, with a lot more programming.

This request seems to be to flag a song or songs so they are simply skipped whenever you happen to play their album, or their folder, or a playlist they are in, etc. No need to create a new list of any kind, it would just trigger automatically and jump to the next track every time a particular song is encountered during normal playback. And I think a simple setting to auto-skip 1-star songs would do that perfectly.

I guess this would end up being sort of a stop-gap solution then. Agreed that an option to skip tracks below a selected rating threshold would suffice for this in the meantime.

[andrewilley]

I guess the code to skip tracks is already present (triggered in cases of read-errors or failed-to-find-files) so including an extra check based an existing database entry like Rating ought to be relatively simple to implement. Might even be nice to include a couple of other existing items at the same time - such as skipping tracks if the duration is longer than a given threshold, or where Play Count is greater than a set amount, etc. Once the conditional skipping code is done, adding a few extra criteria ought to be pretty easy. 

Andre