Alternative approach to large playlist of local files or play files from a local folder #2524
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When trying out Music Assistant on my collection, the first thing I noticed is that I could not simply go to the All Tracks view and hit play. With most "Library" style music players, I'm able to shuffle my entire music collection (or, actually, play randomly - i.e. after each track select a (possibly weighted) random track to play next). It seems like there's no way to do that in Music Assistant other than to add all of my music to a single playlist - and adding 25k+ tracks in one playlist doesn't seem like a viable option? Library players that support playing the library directly often also have a "Queue" feature - the way this usually works is that when the current track ends, then if the queue contains any tracks, it will take the first track from the queue and play that - and remove it from the queue once played. Otherwise if the queue is empty, the player picks the next track from the library in the configured order. This is made a bit tricker from how the providers seem to work - due to details of my music collection organization, I have things spread over multiple folder and need multiple "Local Files" providers that together make up my local collection. I'd like to play tracks from all of those merged together - while excluding any cloud providers, radio providers, podcast providers, etc. |
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I have a fairly large number of tracks in my local collection, and wish to (random) play tracks from a selected folder (and sub-folders) ... kind of like a local radio station without adverts.
I could build a playlist - but I expect that a list of 17,000 tracks would be unwieldy for Music Assistant, and for the client device which is asked to play the list. A different approach may be required as an alternative to large playlists.
I seem to recall a suggestion for the server app to send the next file to the client whenever the currently playing track is about to end. I note that M3U playlists generally include each track's playing time; and I expect that an estimate of playing time could be derived from the individual file properties ... or (of course) directly from the Music Assistant database.
To look at it another way, whereas a playlist is a static list of files, this would be a dynamic service running in the background, periodically selecting and adding the next track to the client device's queue
I have noticed several other people mentioning large playlists or suggesting much the same thing for Home Assistant, so I believe I am not alone.
[Music Assistant 2.0: Your Music, Your Players
Media Player to play a folder?
Local M3U Playlist Song Limit #2323
New Folders category to mirror the filesystem tree #413
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