I use music playlists for things like my workout playlists or shuffling through Christmas music, and they are great for creating collections of otherwise-unrelated songs, but playlists don’t really scale well to larger collections and they aren’t great for collections of whole albums. I am an album listener, by which I mean that I usually pick an artist/album and listen to the whole thing. A playlist is really just a flat list of songs so if you create a filter-based playlist like “All albums released in 2017” it becomes unwieldy and difficult to navigate when viewed as a playlist. My 2017 playlist has over 6 days worth of music in it (1978 songs) - trying to drill through that to a specific album, especially on a mobile device or in PlexAmp, is very challenging.
I would like to have the ability to save my music library filters as a playlist that retains the hierarchical structure (Artist -> Album(s) -> Tracks) of the main library, like a sub-collection of my music library. I would much rather be presented with the list of artists, then be able to drill in and select the album I want to hear that have to scroll through a huge flat list. Perhaps this could be accomplished with a new playlist view option? Thank you for your consideration.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve played with Collections a bit and they meet my ~~needs ~~ desires in some ways but not others. Can I create collections based on filters like I can playlists?
@“Cap’n Awesome” said:
Can I create collections based on filters like I can playlists?
Not directly. i.e. there is no such thing as a ‘smart collection’, like there are ‘smart playlists’.
But you can of course use a filter to get a shorter list of items, which are then easy to ‘select’ together and edit together, in order to add the ‘collection’ label to them all at once.
Thanks mate, I think I can work with this to meet my immediate needs. I still think it would be a great feature if music playlists had an option to view them in a more hierarchical format rather than a flat list, or perhaps smart collections instead.
Hmm… Collections aren’t working the way I thought they would. I can add both artists and individual albums to collections all day long, but when I filter by collection the albums only show up if I added the artist, and then I get ALL of that artists discs, not just the ones I wanted in the collection. All of the albums I added individually don’t show up at all once I filter by collection. I thought I would be able to select which specific albums I wanted in a collection and then view that as a subset of my music library. Do I not understand something fundamental here? What am I doing wrong? Thanks.
@“Cap’n Awesome” said:
I thought I would be able to select which specific albums I wanted in a collection and then view that as a subset of my music library.
When I change the view to an Album View I still only see the Almah albums:
Same results in IOS:
I have verified that the Vanishing Point album still retains the tag for Car Collection but it will only show up in the collection if I tag the artist. Thanks.
That’s the way I’m doing it. Vanishing Point doesn’t show up.
Another oddity that I’ll mention is that Collection Tags that are only applied to albums don’t show up as a choice. When I first began messing around with this I tagged several albums simply as Car. They still have that tag but notice in the screenshot above the collection Car isn’t a choice.
Well, that’s interesting. I apply updates regularly and my server tells me I’m on the latest and greatest version, but apparently it’s lying to me. I’ll manually update tonight and see if that resolves my issues.
@“Cap’n Awesome” said:
Well, that’s interesting. I apply updates regularly and my server tells me I’m on the latest and greatest version, but apparently it’s lying to me. I’ll manually update tonight and see if that resolves my issues.
1.11 is still classified as a ‘beta’.
the update checker doesn’t offer beta versions, unless you tell it to:
Settings - Server - General - ‘Show Advanced’ - ‘Update Channel’ = Beta
Gotcha - that explains the discrepancies I saw. I updated to 1.11 last night and it changed some of the behavior - albums now show up in collections. Unfortunately it seems to be treating album collections as completely separate and distinct from artist collections. I was hoping to be able to add either an artist, in which case I would see all their albums in the collection, or individual albums, in which case I would see the artist at the top level, then just the albums I had tagged.
I can make this work for my needs. I hope this is still a work in progress (obviously it’s still beta) and perhaps this functionality is still in the works. If it isn’t working the way I hope a couple releases down the road perhaps I’ll post a feature request at that point. Thanks for your help.
Early 2021 clean-up: implemented (handling via smart/regular collections which can be created on all tiers of a music library’s organization since the major collection updates in March 2021 – collections tab also available for music libraries)
