I guess this is the same: https://forum.strawberrymusicplayer.org/topic/776/prevent-automatic-collection-update

@robertklsz Sounds like a good idea to me.

@rlkeeney You can backup based on checksums or other attributes aside from modification time. Or use a filesystem like ZFS that allows snapshot-based backups, which makes the whole thing irrelevant.

But regardless, this is why I asked for an option to preserve modification time, not making it the default / sole behavior. I'm sure there are a lot of users that prefer the behavior as-is, or have workflows based around the current behavior like you described. But having an option to preserve timestamps for those of us that prefer that behavior would be appreciated.

@mutt765 yes to be able to sync youtube playlist with your account would be nice

@nitro322
Hello, Yes, this is right ^^

It's just for practicality / speed ...

@kangaroo5496 I second this!

I'm trying to find a replacement for Amarok where, for what it's worth, I have a dynamic playlist that roughly does:

Match all sequentially: The next track from the album else: Match any: tracknumber = 1 and playcount < 9 and (playcount = 0 or lastplay > 4m)

So, it adds the next track in the album and, when the last one it reached, it finds a new "track 1" that has been played less than 9 times, and the last time more than 4 months ago. This avoids too much repetition (which could happen with random selection), and gives some priority to less played albums (e.g. when I add a new one to the collection). Once the list is empty (because there's no album that satisfies the conditions), I just increase the "9" to "10" and listen to my whole library again!

From a quick look at Strawberry, it seems a few things are missing to arrive to that flexibility, but I don't lose hope.

Nevermind, i saw there is a repeat button.

@df

Classical metadata formatting is a bit of nightmare. You can't just run it through Picard and expect good results, sadly there's just legwork involved.

For me, I will have this sort of directory structure:

Johann Sebastian Bach St. Matthew Passion The Bach Collegium Japan and Masaki Suzuki The Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert Karajan Goldberg Variations Glenn Gould

etc. metadata usually looks like this:
Artist: [Composer]
Performer/Album Artist: [Solo Performer Full Name, The [Name] Orchestra and [Conductor] with [Soloist, Concertist]
e.g. The New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein with Van Cliburn
Album: [Composition Name]
e.g. Piano Sonata No. 32 Op. 111
Here Beethoven and Maurizio Pollini are implied from the Artist and Album Artist Fields
Filename: Whatever, just keep it short enough so filesystem isn't mad.
Track Name: Piano Sonata No. 32 Op. 111 - Movement 2 Adagio molto e cantabile

Something like that. Consistency is key. I wish it was less of a pain in the ass but in the absence of recognized standards, you'll be translating things out of German, flipping around Artist/Album Artist, etc.

Foobar2000 and JRiver (Windows) both have good regex tools for standardizing things but like I said it's just tedious. I think it's worth it though.

I would really like being able to skip an entire album.
Similarly it would be nice to be able to do it through the CLI so that I could skip album remotely from my phone (where control is challenging because I cannot browse the playlist).

Wrt OP's custom tag request I believe it can already be achieved with comments; Comment contains Occasion=Christmas.