Posts made by mrbluebudo

@rlkeeney A preference switch would be a much better option. Wish I'd thoughth of it. People who find it useful can keep it on, those who don't can turn it off.

The Date Created field currently seems to pull the date from the file. Unfortunately, this changes when the file is replaced (e.g., by some cloud syncs or if you transcode a song to a different bit rate).

An "Added to Library" date would durable based on when you added it to the player. This would be useful to track how your library grew and when you obtained each song/album.

Coming from iTunes, I found this to be the most confusing aspect of the app. Everything's a playlist. Sometimes I just want to play an album without making it a playlist. Problem is, double-clicking anything essentially creates a playlist so, as @meow notes, it will overwrite or add to whatever's in the current list. I've wiped out a number of playlists that way before I figured it out.

I would love it if the tabs were actually separate and independent views based on the active tab: a "collection view" a "playlist view" and a "smart playlist view"—and the views don't affect each other.

If you're in the Collection view:

• Double clicking displays the song/album/artist in the view window and they become just songs that are playing.
• Default sort for artist is albums in ascending chronological order
• Songs within albums sort sequentially by disc
• Selecting any other song/album/arist doesn't affect anything in the playlist views

If you're in the playlist view (standard):

• Double clicking a playlist opens it in the "playlist view" and plays it.
• Appending or replacing songs to a playlist should be a deliberate act; replacing should prompt "are you sure?"
• Playlists auto-save so there's no need to star anything since it's assumed that creating a playlists means you want it saved.
• There would be a way to access the collection while in the playlist view to create the playlists.

If you're in the smart playlist view:

• Double clicking a smart playlist opens it in the "playlist view" and plays it.
• The edit criteria dialog is accessible and requires a manual save with a prompt if you close without saving (unlike current which doesn't prompt).

I don't understand the appeal of dragging to rate a bunch of songs. It's a song-specific tag so rating many at once seems counterintuitive. That said...

If some users find it a useful feature, that's fine. I don't need it to go away. However, it really should be harder to achieve, maybe with modifier keys or (better) an "are you sure" prompt.

Many times I've somehow managed to rate a bunch of songs at once with no way to undo it. Even if I realize it while it's happening I don't know how to stop it. I don't even know how it happens but it screws up my smart playlists that use song ratings, which is most of them.

I hope this can be figured out.

I'm on version 1.0.17 in Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (Gnome).

I have a number of smart playlists. They vary in their criteria, but recently they all have the same two issues. I think both issues started with version 1.0.17.

Issue 1: Songs Not In Random Order on Open
Setting a smart playlist to display in random order no longer has any effect. It always sorts by Grouping no matter what the list's criteria are and even if grouping is not part of the criteria.

Issue 2: Empty Rules Menus on Edit
When I enter edit mode in a smart playlist (regardless of criteria) they show empty menus for the rules (i.e., contains, equals, etc.). This doesn't seem to affect the songs displayed, but it makes it difficult to know what the existing criteria are if I'm trying to adjust them.

Added screenshots

@jonas Ah. Had no idea. I used it a lot in iTunes. I thought it was a standard tag. Thanks!

@jonas Gotcha. Thanks for the update.

@mrbluebudo Is this possibly related to the inline editing issue discussed here? https://forum.strawberrymusicplayer.org/topic/815/inline-tags-editing-flac-seeking-bugged?_=1682352478856

@mrbluebudo Apparently, the mp4 songs were in my library but they had no tags so they didn't show up anywhere, at least not in the artist/album collections.

So now the question is: why were there no tags after I transcoded the songs?

I transcoded a bunch FLAC songs to AAC (mp4) in my Linux Strawberry collection so I could copy them to an external hard drive and then to my Mac laptop to sync to my iPhone with iTunes.

Weirdly, I don't see the mp4 songs in my Strawberry Library. I did a full rescan and also rebooted to no avail.

The mp4 files are in my Music directory so it won't affect my syncing plan, but I'm wondering why Strawberry doesn't see them.

Why would the Love button be dependent on Scrobbler status? Why isn't it a general file tag like rating?

@jonas Thanks. That's what I figured. I never liked that anyway. I say "played" is actually played not sorta played.

Am I misremembering that there was a setting to determine when a song is marked as played? Or was that only in Clementine?

I'm really liking SMP so far. I'm a macOS/iOS/iTunes convert to Linux. I listen to music almost entirely through smart playlists. One feature I miss from iTunes is the ability to use a playlist as a criteria in a smart playlist, i.e., IN PLAYLISTX or NOT IN PLAYLIST Y.

This feature gave me the ability to create some pretty amazing playlists without having to over stuff my grouping tags (the main criteria for my lists).

Re: Smart playlist sort order
I agree with @spoo333. Sorting and (or at least) manual ordering smart playlists would be very helpful.

As I've said in other posts, my music listening over the years has been almost entirely through the many smart playlists I've created in iTunes. Now that I'm on Linux, I'm recreating them in SMP. With as many smart playlists as I have, sorting is a huge benefit.

Hope this makes it into a build.

@jonas The post was about albums being split into multiple instances. I posted here because the same issue was happening to me and I determined that it was related to the grouping tag field not the sort group by function (except that the group by feature made the issue visible). Changing the grouping tag values stopped the problem so I thought there was value in posting.

Splitting an album by the grouping tag field seems more like a hack to me, not anything intentional. It's fine if there's a feature to enable if someone wants it, but the existing behavior didn't seem to be an intentional feature. I don't see why an album should be broken up at all except possibly compilations into their individual artists.

I just downloaded Strawberry (v 1.0.7) as a replacement for Clementine (v 1.4.0rc1-827-gbbda59a5f) and I'm having this problem too. I don't use subsonic (don't even know what it is) but I find that many albums are broken into separate discs in the collection. I discovered that it has to do with the grouping tag field. If songs in an album have different values for the grouping field Strawberry will display each identical grouping set in the collection as a separate album. This isn't affected by the Display Options > Group By setting (I use Artist/Album).

I tested this by changing all the grouping tags in an album to make them identical and only one album was displayed in the collection with all songs in it.

It seems to me that the albums listed in the collection should follow the values in the "Album" field. Isn't that what the field is for?

My collection was originally in iTunes on macOS before I moved to Linux a few months ago. Since there's nothing like a "style" tag, I use the "grouping" field to add comma-delimited styles for more robust and flexible smart playlist creation. An album may have genre = "rock" but the grouping field may include "hard rock," "southern rock," "industrial," etc. Individual songs on an album may also have additional tags (e.g., "instrumental," "cover song," "live," "summer," "workout," etc.).

I seem to remember that Clementine did this when I started using it but at some point it stopped. I don't remember if I changed a setting (none seem to look relevant), if there was an update, or if I downloaded a different version.

I've meticulously tagged my collection over the years (ripped from more than 2,000 CDs) so this is a bit frustrating. If I can't resolve this I'll probably go back to Clementine.