Custom tag reading

[Liam Turner]

Hello

At present I've been toying with switching from rocket player to Power amp but I see that of the 3 features I most want in a player Rocket does 2/3 and Power amp does only one.

 

Rocket player is slipping downhill quality wise and I keep hearing good things about power amp.

 

My 3 features I most want are

1:Shuffle by album (Check, Power amp can do this)

2: Dynamic playlist generation based on tag (Not yet but it's in the frequently asked for features thread so I will simply add my voice).

3: Ability to read custom TXXX: fields from MP3 files. I have with MP3 tag added 2 custom fields to all of my files one TXXX:SourceMedia and one TXXX:CountryOfOrigin which store the media type I ripped the song from and the bands originating country respectively.

I want to use those in Dynamic playlists to for example generate a playlist containing all my 45s or a playlist of just my Casettes

Or to for example get a dynamic list of all my Canadian music, or all my Commonwealth artists so The Beatles (UK), AC/DC (Australia), the Bee Gees (Australia), And the myriad of artists from my home and native land (Canada) would all be in one list.

 

I have those lists functioning In musicbee on windows and I can export them as M3U lists to put on my phone as static lists but then every time I buy a new album I have to manually do the update.

 

It's unlikely Rocket Player will add custom tag reading so if I want that I have to Jump ship and no player I have found can do it so I ask you to consider it as power amp seems both popular, functional, and adding features over time.

[andrewilley]

As you say, point (1) is available in most music players, including PA.

Points (2) and (3) are sort of related. At some point Poweramp may introduce smart / dynamic playlists - for example creating a playlist which when played would get instantly updated and might contain the current selection of songs from certain Folders or Artists, or from Genres "Pop", "Rock" and "Progressive", or with a rating of 3-stars and above, or added to the Library within the last three months, etc. There is an external app called Music Playlist Manager which can do some of this now by the way, but you'd need to run it to update the saved playlist - the contents won't be updated dynamically when you choose to listen to any given Playlist in Poweramp.

However it's unlikely that PA will ever automatically scan every tag in the ID3 spec into its database - let alone each user-defined TXXX tag that it encounters. It currently stores a dozen or so items in the database during the main music scan, with a few others (such as Lyrics and cover artwork) getting read on-the-fly when the song is accessed. That's out of well over 100 tags detailed in the ID3v2.4 spec. So to create a playlist that dynamically references user-defined tags would require the entire music library to be fully rescanned to update the list, which would simply not be practical as that process can take anything from a minute or two to over an hour for a huge library. My own 8,500 song collection takes about 2½ minutes to rescan for example.

Andre

[Liam Turner]

Ah, that's unfortunate as I can do it as I say with music Bee on windows just fine

[MotleyG]

6 hours ago, Liam Turner said:

Ah, that's unfortunate as I can do it as I say with music Bee on windows just fine

MusicBee is quite powerful, but it is a Windows-only platform player. There is no player I am aware of on any mobile platform that would have the processing power and capacity to expand the database into what could essentially be an almost infinite number of custom tags. It just isn't feasible.

What you can do to get around this is create the Auto-Playlist in MusicBee, then export those results into a standard playlist. While this will remove the dynamic capabilities of any changes on the fly, it will at least provide you with a way to have these playlists available while mobile. And since you likely aren't making big changes to your mobile library, the playlists shouldn't be impacted that much. Besides, the relatively small file sizes of the playlist means you can make updates and add more of them as often as you like from within MusicBee, and add them to Poweramp for use on the go. Just make sure you save them as .m3u8 files for maximum reliability.

[andrewilley]

8 hours ago, MotleyG said:

 expand the database into what could essentially be an almost infinite number of custom tags

That would be the main problem: there are some audio files that contain an absurd amount of textual and image data (sometimes the images can be larger that the audio content itself) and storing all of that, for potentially hundreds or thousands of audio files, in a database would just not be a practical option. Not only would be database end up being huge, I imagine there would also be performance ramifications too. Even Lyrics content is not currently stored in the database, the text is read at playback time just like cover artwork is.

I suspect some existing spec tags may end up being stored in the future though - BPM for example, and maybe Ratings ('POPM') at some point - but definitely not everything.

Andre