Play All Albums by Artist

[rbz5416]

Following discussion elsewhere, it has become apparent that Poweramp cannot perform what I perceive to be a logical function. That is to select an artist & play all albums by the artist but maintaining the track order of the albums. Currently the options are:

Play by track no. - This plays all the track #1s followed by all the track #2s.

Play by album - Track numbering is disregarded & tracks are instead played alphabetically.

There is an "almost" workaround but that then doesn't stop at the selected artist & goes on to play all artists following that selected.

It's been implied that I'm the only user ever to want this feature, so the purpose of this thread is to gauge that. If it's something you'd like to see please add a post of support. If no one else really wants it I'll quetly go away & seek out another player.

 

 

[flyingdutchman]

I am surprised that this is a problem for Poweramp. The list and sort options are endless but not well understood (and undocumented). My app New Playlist Manager does have the ability to create m3u playlists for all/some albums for an artist. The track sequence is mantained for each album. Lots of the other functionality was created from suggestions and requests on this forum such as the updating of the mp3 Popm tag with ratings assigned in Poweramp.

[andrewilley]

That was my suggestion for a workaround too, create a playlist (or use enqueue if it's only needed once) for the whole artist, or for whichever of their albums you currently want to listen to anyway.

The problem that the OP has is that although Poweramp can play all of an artist, in album and track order, each separate album is treated as an individual list (rather than the artist being treated as a list, which does not separate albums before applying track ordering). This means that with Repeat off PA only plays one album and stops, and with Advance List enabled it does what it's told and continues to play all subsequent lists (including moving on to the next artist when all of the current artist's albums have been played). I can see the issue, but it's a bit of an esoteric one.

Incidentally, to add albums (in album then track order) to a playlist within PA, go into the Artist library view and tap on the artist's name. Then tap Menu > Add to Playlist , and multi-select all the albums you wish to listen to. Finally, tap Add to put all those currently selected albums into a new playlist. Enqueue works in exactly he same way, but you don't need the final step of giving the resulting list a name as there is only one queue.

Andre

[wgabi]

I feel your pain. I almost abandoned PA because of this. And no, I don't agree with the rest of the world, sorry. We should not need to use any workaround to use a music player this way. This is the "normal" way, as you said the "logical" way.

Sometimes I like to listen all my music, like if it was an enormous playlist. Even if I listening the songs in randomly, still every now and then I feel I want jump to a certain song. Only I find myself searching for the song for long seconds, because they are not where they supposed to be (at least not when I use the "All Songs" list. The best I can do is to sort the songs by artists, but some of my artists has nearly a hundred songs, and they all appear, well... in alphabetical. And before all of you say that I can find that way the song easier, I must argue. In some cases maybe, but I don't remember all my songs' titles, however I'm more or less know on which album I can find that song. So it is much easier to find a song if there is order, "logical order". 

When I want to listen all my music, in normal order, then it is absolutely ridiculous if they are coming in alphabetical order. I just can't imagine if anyone would like to listen that way.

Also, I never had a music player (Windows, Mac) where I didn't have this choice. I never had to, and don't want to create playlists with another apps, to go around this problem. PA is a fantastic app, I bought it as soon as I tried it. (Got frustrated later when I found out about this problem). I still love PA, and use it as my main music player. And for the love of all the Gods, I can't figure it out, why this complex app missing the most basic feature. Because PA is just sound so great, and looks good as well, even if I hated, I had to do a workaround.

In my case, I chose the only permanent way to fix this problem. (Because even if you make extra stupid playlists, you will have to update those lists every time you add new songs to your collection. And again I just don't want to do that.) So I renamed all my songs (filenames), "artist - album - song.mp3" format. Yeah, I know, that gives me some ridiculous long filenames in some cases, but this is the only solution. This way the tags inside are untouched, so they appear in "normal" way in the player, but you can sort the songs by filenames, and they will be in "artist - album" order. Luckily I could do this renaming process on my friends PC in a batch process, so I didn't have to do it manually. (Then I would have really abandoned PA).

Now I just wish PA could edit album art. Again I was totally surprised when I found out that I can edit all important tags, but the album art. It maybe ok for a free, basic music player, but a top quality, paid app should have this function.

[andrewilley]

I use folder / filename sorting too (I always have done in fact). However there are a ton of Library modes which cover pretty much every eventuality, it's just a case of working out which one is best for you. For me, as I said, it's folders.

However if you want to see Artists alphabetically, with their Albums listed and then the songs within them, you can do that too. The first item in each Artist's list will be a full list of all their songs though. As this is not the order that you want playback to occur in, I suggest starting playback from within one of the albums, so the playback sequence continues in artist>album>song sort order.

If you just want to find a particular song, use the Search feature (which in the new alpha-test builds for PA v3 is actually an icon on the Player screen too). I'm actually finding I use it a lot more now that the icon is so easily available, and I can find pretty much any song in a matter of seconds.

Andre

[wgabi]

I'm a bit old-school probably, but most of the times I like to see the list of my songs when I look for a song, kind of scrolling through them. The reason is, that often I'm not even sure which song I'm looking for, just have a feeling that I really want to listen a certain artist, or a specific album, but necessarily all of their song. So I will not choose that artist or album only, because I want the player keep going on.

Also, when I listen all of my songs in random order, it is imperative to me to able to scroll to a song I suddenly want to listen, tap on it, then just let it go... this way after that song being played, the random playing of all the songs are just keep going on. But having the songs appear in the artist-album order in the list is just so much better. Once again, I always had things in that way in any other player.

I'm sorry, but my "weird" way to rename my files is the only way to accomplish what I want.

It is beyond my understanding why not is possible though. As you said there are tons of options. When I choose a genre or artist, or a playlist I can sort them many different ways, why not artist-album?

In "All Songs" you gave us option to sort the song even by ratings, date added, etc... but not the most important artist by album. I can see that sometimes one may want to sort the songs in those ways, but I'm pretty sure that is not the most desired way to most of us, definitely not all the time.

I know this arguing is pointless, I can see that there are overwhelmingly lot of feature request, bug fixing, etc. And it seems like not too many people actually complaining about this issue. That is why I had to solve my problem. By renaming my files, I now can sort them in a way I want them.

Reading through some of the forum, I just feel like you guys are always have an answer to the problem that suggests we just don't know how to use the app. Yet in this case just there is no other way, but to rename the files.

Ok, to be fair, sometimes, you are right. Like that random playing icon, I'm lost there. That is the weirdest thing in my life I've ever seen, and there is no explanation in the player how to use it. Again, coming from any other player, one would think that pressing crossed arrows starts playing my current playlist in random order, but instead it starts playing all my songs. So I have to press it again, but I really don't know what the other three state actually doing. For example, I choose a genre based playlist, which has let's say 100 songs, I start playing them in randomly, but when I choose the other states of the button, I don't see any differences, still shows 100 songs. If it is documented somewhere please let me know. (only if it's actually explained well, not just listed features)

I still think random button should work in two states, on or off. When it is on it would randomly play whatever playlist is playing at that moment. Simple as that. But maybe if I understand how it works I will appreciate the thing.

Well, this might came out a bit too negative... But in truth, as I said before I love PA, and appreciate the hard work you guys doing, even taking your time to answering on the forum.

So I would like to ask you to promote my request to the developer team please. I know I could ask it on the forum, but I think it would be lost amongst the countless posts. I would lik to able to embed locally stored album art into my mp3 files. The album art feature built in is totally useless to me, because I don't listen American, British, or other "Western" music, so the system almost never finds any art. Even if it can, often the size or quality is not fit to use them. So for some of us it would be very important to add our own art. Also embedding them into the files are much better way, because if something happens to my phone, tablet, or just transfer the files, I would lose the arts. (I always have my songs backed-up with album arts embedded)

 

Thanks

G.

[andrewilley]

I tend to agree that the initial 'all songs by artist' item that you see when you drill down from the Artist's name is a bit counter-intuitively ordered. What PA is doing is to use your chosen song-level sort order to format the list. This works well enough if you sort your songs alphabetically, but is not a lot of use if you sort the songs by track# (as you get all of the tracks set as #1, then all of the track #2s, etc). It's a failing of having rather too many user-settable options I fear. You can still see by album then song, but you need to drill down so that's not one long list for any given artist.

The Shuffle modes are very comprehensive, and you can do a lot with them. They work as follows (with the generic term 'list' meaning the current playback type - which could for example be Folders, Albums, Artists, Genres, etc):

• Off: No shuffling, all songs and lists are played using the regular order. 
• All Songs: Plays every song in your entire library, in a completely random order. [This is the mode I use the most, so the next track is always a complete surprise]
• Shuffle Songs, Lists in Order: All of the songs in the current list are played in random order, then playback moves on to the next list in order and those songs are played randomly, and so on. [For example, all songs in FolderOne will be played in random song order, then all songs in FolderTwo are played in random order, then FolderThree is played, then FolderFour, etc]
• Shuttle Lists, Songs in Order: A random list is chosen and then all of the songs within it are played in their regular order from start to finish. Once that list is complete, a new random list is chosen and played from start to finish, and so on. [For example, FolderTen might be chosen first and it would be played in its normal track order, then FolderFive is played in its regular track order, then FolderThree, etc. This is like choosing a random album and listening to it from start to finish, then picking a new random album and doing the same]
• Shuffle Songs, Shuffle Lists: A random list is chosen and then all of its songs are played randomly. Then a new list is chosen at random, and all of its songs are also played randomly.[This is like picking a random album and shuffling its songs, then picking a new album at random and shuffle all of its songs, etc] 

Hope this all makes sense, it's actually not too difficult once you get the basic principle.

Personally I would also like to see a simple tap on the Shuffle icon toggle the shuffle mode on and off, with a long-press used to adjust the particular mode of shuffle that you require (easier if you regularly use one particular mode).

Andre

[wgabi]

Thanks very much, I think I see now a bit better. The problem is that "folders" are not "lists" at least not in the universe I live :-) But I will try something? Maybe I put all my songs in one folder? Since I have them renamed artist-album-song format they would be in perfect order... then I wouldn't have to worry about this mixed thing.

Thanks again.

[andrewilley]

The use of 'List' here is a generic term used to refer to the currently playing group of songs, which will vary depending on your playback mode - basically whatever Library mode you started playback in (an icon is shown to the left of the song title within the Player screen to remind you of the current choice). It could be a Folder, an Album, an Artist, a Genre, a Playlist, or one of the pseudo-lists such as Most Played or Recently Added.

I agree that for new users the term 'List' could be confused with the more specific term 'Playlist', but I'm not sure what word might work better to describe all of the above possibilities?

Andre

[rbz5416]

On 05/07/2016 at 8:33 AM, andrewilley said:

That was my suggestion for a workaround too, create a playlist (or use enqueue if it's only needed once) for the whole artist, or for whichever of their albums you currently want to listen to anyway.

 

Unfortunately Enqueue uses the same sort method, so Enqueueing an artist results in the same silly (IMO) alphabetical listing of all the tracks across all of the albums. I'm certainly not going to mess around adding all the albums individually. But it seems as though there's precious little support for this request so I'll start looking for another player.

Thanks for your help Andre, please feel free to close/delete the thread.

[andrewilley]

3 hours ago, rbz5416 said:

 I'm certainly not going to mess around adding all the albums individually

If you want to play all of the albums by one artist (in order) and then stop at the end of that artist, go to the artist list, tap Menu > Enqueue (or Add to Playlist if you prefer) and then tap 'Select All' to choose all of their albums, then Enqueue (or Add) to finish. If you use the Playlist method, it'll be there if you want to listen to all of the same artist's albums again. Enqueue would be quicker for a one-off though, just three or four taps needed.

Alternatively, you could just press the stop button when the last album has finished playing... This does all seem like a lot of worrying for the sake of pressing one button after many hours of listening.

Andre