Favorite Albums

[eldal]

Hi. I know you guys are all about "categories", but this player really needs to allow favorites at the album level. You could even make it so when you make an album a favorite, then it simply displays the album also in a favorites category. Then it's still all categories. 

[andrewilley]

'Album' is just one of the category types that are already supported by Poweramp. You can use whatever catgeory mode you want at the time (for example sometimes I use Albums, sometimes Folders, and sometimes Playlists).

However an album is just a collection of songs, and it's the songs themselves that can be rated.

There is an existing Feature Request for a customisable 'Favourites' system, which you can add your vote for here:

Andre

[eldal]

Yes I know all of this. But an album is a collection specifically curated by an artist to go together. And finding the albums I listen to most is like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Why could you not have a favorite category like favorite collections that you could favorite at a favorite album or Playlist level. 

[Bencherished]

1 hour ago, eldal said:

 And finding the albums I listen to most is like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Why could you not have a favorite category like favorite collections that you could favorite at a favorite album or Playlist level. 

Wow, how many albums do you have? If you have album(s) you listen to most, why not use most played category, look for one of the songs in the album, long press it, info/tags, and click on the album title, it will take you to that album. 

You can create a playlist, name it favourites, and add songs and albums to it for easy reach. 

Bencherished. 

[eldal]

Wow, a lot of resistance to a feature that is standard on nearly every streaming service and player. At any rate, I'm not gonna get down in the mud about it since I really like everything else about the player.

[andrewilley]

49 minutes ago, eldal said:

Wow, a lot of resistance 

No resistance at all. As I said before, it's an existing Feature Request and you can add your vote for it via the link I posted.

Andre

[eldal]

@andrewilley moreso the other comment and just other threads I've read before posting. I did vote though, thanks for the link. 

One simple (ish) idea would be to be able to heart an album for example and not have a category for it, but rather a filter in the existing albums category to show only hearted. 

[andrewilley]

Remember that if Albums were to get their own favourite 'heart' rating (and why just one heart, surely it should be 1-5 stars like songs?) then so should all the other containers that Poweramp supports - Folders, Artists, Composers, Genres, Years, Playlists, etc. Albums are not the be-all and end-all of everyone's digital music collection.

The idea of making a simple list which you could add items to and move them around was that anything could be added there depending on your needs. That could be all albums if that's your preference, or some folders, a bunch of artists, a genre, etc.

Andre

[eldal]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

Remember that if Albums were to get their own favourite 'heart' rating (and why just one heart, surely it should be 1-5 stars like songs?) then so should all the other containers that Poweramp supports - Folders, Artists, Composers, Genres, Years, Playlists, etc. Albums are not the be-all and end-all of everyone's digital music collection.

The idea of making a simple list which you could add items to and move them around was that anything could be added there depending on your needs. That could be all albums if that's your preference, or some folders, a bunch of artists, a genre, etc.

Andre

I was thinking some kind of single favorite or not favorite. And sure you could use it for whatever collection type. And then just add a filter to only show the favorited within the category or show all. 

Edited June 10 by eldal

[6b6561]

12 hours ago, Bencherished said:

Wow, how many albums do you have?

As of today I have 1073 legal albums with a total of 14514 tracks. Rating individual songs isn't really feasible.

I'm pretty much an album guy and would very much appreciate a rating system right in Poweramp for albums so that I could easily find the top rated ones.

How do I find what to listen to:

• Sometimes the library "talks" to me and I know exactly what I want to listen to.
• Sort by album rating in 3rd party app.
• Shuffle the album list, and pick one of the albums from the list and listen to it. (Sweet talked @flyingdutchman to implement this functionality in his Playlist manager)

Shuffle album list is great as I quite often listen to "forgotten" albums.

@eldal take a look at Playlist Manager as that allows for album rating and sort by rating, takes just 5 taps to launch an album through it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flyingdutchman.newplaylistmanager&hl=en_US&gl=US

Take a look at the following thread, it takes you five taps to launch an album through Playlist manager...

@flyingdutchman any chance to sweet talk you into adding a start in "Library - Album"?

[6b6561]

@andrewilley one issue with the Album category is that re-sorting is a bit cumbersome, as it takes several taps to go into the list settings and change the sort order. Album is one category which should have a quick sort button.

I'm a bit tired of the "it's just a bunch of tracks" argument. For a user it's an album and as a user you shouldn't have to worry about that part as the rating can be applied on the album entity in the DB, you could as well add a comment or whatever on the album level in the DB.

"UX User Stories" is a good way to deal with requests.

As a I user I would like to be able to rate my albums 1-5 so that I could sort them accordingly and find my favourites.

Then it's up to the developers to figure out if the request is feasible and when to implement. This one is a bit cumbersome to implement, as you need to find a good place for the rating interface for the album, once that's done it should be fairly simple to add a sort by to the Album category.

[andrewilley]

As this has come up a few times before, I'll add it to the Frequently Requested Features list, and create a votable option.

As ratings are only stored locally in the database on PA, it shouldn't matter that there is no matching embedded tag to save it back into.

I would suggest such "Category Ratings' are displayed much like the song ratings in song lists (using stars or thumbs as per user's choice). And it should be possible to rate any valid Category item (so Album, Folder, Playlist, Stream, Genre, Artist, etc) with the selection icon provided via the long-press actions menu.

Poweramp does not provide any features for filtering of lists, but it ought to be easy enough to add an extra sort item in each Category's List Options screen to put top rated items first.

Andre

[andrewilley]

OK, you can vote for Ratings for Categories here. This would include being able to 'Thumbs Up' your favourite Albums and sort them at the top of album views, as per the original request.

Andre

[eldal]

19 hours ago, Bencherished said:

Wow, how many albums do you have? 

You actually don't even have to have a lot of albums to make this cumbersome. In my case I have a few long and correctly meta tagged (single song files) Playlists. This ends up making album entries for the corresponding songs' origin in the album list. So I only have maybe 20 full albums on my device at a given time, but hundreds of albums show in my album list. If there is a setting for this that I'm missing, would be interested to know. 

@andrewilley I voted on your new item.

@6b6561 thanks for chiming in and for the tips on the Playlist manager. I'll check it out. 

Edited June 10 by eldal
Clarification

[MotleyG]

15 minutes ago, eldal said:

In my case I have a few long and correctly meta tagged Playlists.

Just curious, how does a text file with pointers to each file involve any meta data?

15 minutes ago, eldal said:

So I only have maybe 20 full albums on my device at a given time, but hundreds of albums show in my album list. If there is a setting for this that I'm missing, would be interested to know.

This is a bit more confusing. If all of the songs on your device are grouped into 20 albums with the same name, how does it create 100's in the list?

Are you using the Albumartist tag correctly? This is used to ensure Albums that have have many individual artists like compilations or perhaps even just one duet stay together.

As long as the combination of Albumartist+Album is unique Poweramp will display it as one Album in that category. 

Edited June 10 by MotleyG
Typo

[andrewilley]

17 minutes ago, eldal said:

n my case I have a few long and correctly meta tagged Playlists. This ends up making album entries for the corresponding songs' origin in the album list. So I only have maybe 20 full albums on my device at a given time, but hundreds of albums show in my album list.

Not quite sure what you mean by this. Playlists are just treated as a simple text list of audio filenames by Poweramp, no extra meta data is read from the #EXTINF lines in M3U files for example (in fact, virtually all # lines are treated as comments). Any song files referenced within the playlist must already exist in Poweramp's music library database.

Albums are generated during the music scanning process, based on both the Album and the Album Artist tags matching between different audio files. If those two tags match in two separate songs, the songs will become part of one Album. But that's nothing to do with Playlists, they are a list of songs, and have no knowledge of albums.

Andre

[eldal]

I have a folder of a bunch of one offs that make up a playlist. The tracks have correct meta info. I don't bring in the full albums because I don't have the full albums. 

@MotleyG @andrewilley

Edited June 10 by eldal

[andrewilley]

6 minutes ago, eldal said:

I have a folder of a bunch of one offs that make up a playlist. The tracks have correct meta info. I don't bring in the full albums because I don't have the full albums. 

In which case every one-off song will be assigned as being part of whatever album is stated in its tags. If no other tracks for that album are present, it will show as an album with one song. Are you saying that you don't actually have an actual Playlist (such as an M3U file, or a Playlist created within Poweramp) for these songs, just that they are all stored in one folder?

I would suggest either:

(a) remove the embedded Album tags completely if you don't want to use them. I have a folder of about 1,000 individual random one-off songs where I have set both the Album title and Album Artist tags to "Singles". They thus all appear inside one big 'album' called "Singles".

(b) Use Folder browsing rather than viewing by Albums.

Andre

[eldal]

8 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

In which case every one-off song will be assigned as being part of whatever album is stated in its tags. If no other tracks for that album are present, it will show as an album with one song.

Correct. Creating a lot of entries in Albums category, making it hard to find favorites. But anyone with a lot of albums or one-offs would potentially have the same issue of a lot if clutter to get to favorites. 

So yeah, I often use workarounds like long pressing to get to an album on a track or more often using folders. But still both are workarounds. 

edit: @andrewilley I'm not sure if you are confirming my point or saying there is a way to filter out albums with one track. But many times I have 2 or 3 tracks from the same album on a playlist, so albums are created with 2-3 tracks as they should. 

 

Edited June 10 by eldal

[MotleyG]

11 minutes ago, eldal said:

But many times I have 2 or 3 tracks from the same album on a playlist, so albums are created with 2-3 tracks as they should. 

This is the correct behaviour for the category browser.

Every song file is a distinct file. The folder and filename structure is irrelevant except when you choose to browse that way. Poweramp (and most other players) will build a library that can be browsed more easily if you have tagged each song with metadata. The more details included, the better the browsing.

Key tags are Title, Album, Albumartist, Artist, Composer, and Genre. If you are ripping from physical media and want to maintain the track order you will also want to include track and disc numbers and totals. There are many more standard fields available in the spec, but you may find most players don't use them all.

Favourite tracks are not specific to the track itself so there isn't a tag for this. The closest you can get is the ratings. These are best kept in playlists instead.

Favourite albums is not as easily done but if you browse by Albumartist>Album it is a pretty quick way to get there.

[eldal]

@MotleyG Yes, I'm aware of why the behavior is why it is like it is. I was answering your initial question.

[andrewilley]

49 minutes ago, eldal said:

But many times I have 2 or 3 tracks from the same album on a playlist, so albums are created with 2-3 tracks as they should. 

I'm still not completely clear on what you are saying here.

'Albums' are not created by Playlists, and have nothing to do with Playlists; a Playlist is just a text list of pointers to otherwise unconnected song files. 'Albums' are created by any song having an embedded Album tag. If you only have one song with a particular Album tag in your library, you will see an Album entry containing just that one song. That is expected behaviour.

As I said, if you don't want to treat your songs as tracks from a one-song album, remove the embedded 'Album' tag completely. I do that with all my singles. For example, I don't have a lot of songs by Gerry Rafferty on my phone - in fact, just "Baker Street" in my Singles folder. Although that song was included in his album "City to City", I have nothing else from that album so I simply removed the Album name tag. I changed it to "Singles", but you could just as easily leave it blank. Then I can find it quickly using the Artists category. 

Andre

[eldal]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

I'm still not completely clear on what you are saying here.

'Albums' are not created by Playlists, and have nothing to do with Playlists; a Playlist is just a text list of pointers to otherwise unconnected song files. 'Albums' are created by any song having an embedded Album tag. If you only have one song with a particular Album tag in your library, you will see an Album entry containing just that one song. That is expected behaviour.

As I said, if you don't want to treat your songs as tracks from a one-song album, remove the embedded 'Album' tag completely. I do that with all my singles. For example, I don't have a lot of songs by Gerry Rafferty on my phone - in fact, just "Baker Street" in my Singles folder. Although that song was included in his album "City to City", I have nothing else from that album so I simply removed the Album name tag. I changed it to "Singles", but you could just as easily leave it blank. Then I can find it quickly using the Artists category. 

Andre

I hear you. I understand it is expected behavior, but that is just how I had it. I understand your workarounds. Was answering the question asked by Bencherished of how many albums I had. 

I already do use folders as a workaround. 

The reason I used the term playlist is because that is the only scenario I have single tracks from albums in my storage. On my device I have a playlist folder and then I add that whole folder as a playlist in the player to create the matching text file. 

Edited June 10 by eldal

[andrewilley]

@eldal Ah, that makes a bit more sense. So there were no playlists involved in this 'album creation' process at all, merely a folder full of individual songs which Poweramp then scanned and placed those songs into appropriate albums exactly as the Album tags told it to. The only instance of a real Playlist here was that you later added all of the songs from that folder into one new internal playlist for your own reasons.

Andre

[eldal]

@andrewilley that is correct, thus the frustration that led to the original suggestion of favorite albums, etc.... As a means to filter down albums to my favorites. So for now I use the folders workaround since I keep my full albums in a separate folder on my device. But that folder is organized as folder name > artist > album. So it's a bit of clicking to get to an album that way.