This looks really cool! As a classical music fan, the one feature that I've always wanted but have never found is the ability to link several tracks together. Often times classical CDs break up a single piece into multiple tracks, so if you're listening to your library on shuffle, you will often jump into the middle of a piece, which is annoying. It would be so cool if there were a music player where you could link several tracks together as one piece so that shuffle would always start from the beginning and wouldn't shuffle away until the end.
Modern music players and online stores are really neglectful of classical music. I downloaded an album of Jascha Heifetz recordings from the Google Play store, and the track titles are all of the form "Violin Concerto in D Major", "Violin Concerto no. 2", etc, with no indication at all of who composed which piece. The tagging is terribly inconsistent, with the artist sometimes being the composer, sometimes the orchestra, sometimes the conductor, sometimes the soloist, sometimes an arbitrary subset of all those.
I'd really like for someone to make a music player or online store that worked better with classical music. Hell, I'd settle for one that didn't suck.
Have you tried arkivmusic.com? They're classical music only, and a pretty good place to get music. I buy physical CDs only (the crappy tagging being one of the reasons), but they seem to take classical music seriously, so my guess is their digital downloads would be pretty good regarding tags and other info.
Tag your music with musicbrainz.org, they have very strict guidelines for tagging, and when they don't have a release you have bought, you can research and add the information yourself.
The Redbook audio specification allows for indexes (ability to have tracks within tracks), which was intended for jumping to the next movement within classical pieces. I haven't seen the buttons for this on a CD player (real or virtual) since the late 1980s.
Interesting idea. I've thought about that too, for songs that seamlessly transition into each other. The tricky part is how to incorporate that into the UI in a way that is not confusing and doesn't add a bunch of clutter.
Seems like the type of thing that you would have needed to consider pretty early in the architecture of the application. At least to be done elegantly. You'd probably need the ability to have track entries that are "faux" (not mapped from a media file) metadata track entries that the app understands and will spider out to the real files/tracks behind the scenes whenever encountered in a playlist or whatever play context.
That might not be trivial at this stage. But yeah, I agree, the trickiest part would be crafting an intuitive UI around the feature.
Doesn't seem too difficult to me for either UI or playing. iTunes already supports this idea with their "grouping" tag (though it doesn't really do anything AFAIK). It doesn't need to be constantly visible in the UI. Being available with right click and "Get Info" is good enough for me. If you wanted more, you could add a "grouping" column to the view and a button on that column to collapse or un-collapse groups to appear as one track with the group name.
If you're shuffle playing and the next song in the queue has a non-empty group tag, remove it from the queue and instead add the whole group in the correct order. Everything else should be handled the same.
It might be a bad way of handling it (and if it is, I'd be glad to know why). But that's how I would implement such a feature.
So far my idea is that this would be exposed in the album view in the library - you could show line segments connecting songs which have been "grouped". This would make the state obvious and also provide a convenient way to multiselect and toggle grouping. Also when a song comes up solo (perhaps because the user chose to do so) since there is no where to draw a line segment to it would simply have a dot in a predictable location to indicate that it is missing its sister track.
Yeah I like the idea of representing the linkage as chain links.
Then you could show a broken chain link if a linked track is shown in a view by itself sans sibling(s).
That type of UI would be simple enough when you want to link tracks that appear in sequence on an album. Are there any use cases for the ability to link unrelated tracks X Y Z together? Probably not. Playlisting pretty much covers all that functionality.
Music players with cue sheet support kinda support the inverse of this. Throw a .cue into foobar and it will turn a whole album encoded as a single, giant .tta file (how I wish the Japanese knew of FLAC) into logically separate tracks. As I mentioned above, however, this isn't really necessary when album shuffle mode + a separate playlist solves the problem just fine on every existing music player.
The best way I've found to handle this for DJ sets is to use a single MP3 file and a CUE sheet with the times each subtrack starts. Then your media player has to support CUE sheets (Winamp has/had a plugin, Foobar2000 does, other than those YMMV). Matroska Audio showed promise in being the format where this would just work out of the box, but loses due to first mover advantage of mp3s and the market reach of other formats.
iTunes will let you do this when you're importing a cd. From memory, you right click on the tracks you want joined (before they're imported) and select the appropriate option. The only drawback is that iTunes Match (if you use it) won't match the joined file, so it'll have to upload manually.
You don't really need special support for this. Most music players have a mode for shuffling albums at a time, not individual tracks. Just make a classical playlist and select that mode.
As for shuffling your entire library, I don't understand why you'd want to do that. I get in the mood for certain genres; I don't want to jump from Rainbow to nordloef to Massive Attack randomly over the course of 10 minutes.
iTunes can do that -- and it was added specifically for classical music. It's even called Groupping.
Another nice feature it has, is that it lets you handle albums with various artists as one entity, that is, you can set those tracks as "part of a compilation".
How, though? As discussed elsewhere in the thread, it doesn't seem as though "smart playlists" are quite that smart, and I'm not familiar enough with iTunes to make a guess as to how else it might be accomplished.
