[mb-users] playlists

[Chad Wilson]

What you're asking for is quite possible if you use a media player that 
is, well, probably not WinAMP; i.e. one that allows you to search and 
index by structured tag data, not filenames, which (my opinion) are 
generally a poor mechanism to build playlists on.

Even if you change the file to be named "artist - track", by default the 
track numbers and album name are saved to the music file tags inside the 
file header, so with a player that respects these in its library, you 
could sort/group by album and play a whole album.

Picard and MusicBrainz are album/release-centric, yes. Picard is 
oriented towards /tagging/ i.e. persisting all known data in a 
structured way to ID3(or equivalent) music file tag headers. Playlists 
are a user-concern, i.e. nothing to do with the shared server data that 
MB seeks to capture.

I guess one could consider "by album" to be one form of playlist for an 
entire artist's tracks; but really, playlists are a separate concern in 
my mind. MB and Picard are about getting correct data into files, not 
about making choices for you about how you should play your music. This 
should be a concern for the music player of choice, and the efficiency 
with which it allows you to sort, find and query for music /based/ on 
those tags.

Anyway, Picard is equally suited towards customising the way in which 
files are name as to tags saved to files. It's somewhat power-user like, 
but if you want to change which tags, and the way tags are saved from 
MB's data, you may want to check out TaggerScript at 
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardQt/Scripting, part of Picard 0.9.0.

Chad / voiceinsideyou

Will Holcomb wrote:
> What if, once I've named my files using the "%artist% - %album%" 
> format I would like to listen to an album as the artist originally 
> prepared it? What I was looking for is a way to conveniently and 
> consistently name a largely song-based music collection while still 
> having access to album orderings.
>
> I was also trying to see if there was some sort of philosophical issue 
> with playlists. Picard seems structured toward capturing album order 
> in the filename and I was wondering if there was a reason for that 
> decision.
>
> Will
>
> On Jan 10, 2008 1:45 PM, Oliver Charles 
> <oliver.g.charles at googlemail.com 
> <mailto:oliver.g.charles at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Will,
>
>     I don't quite understand what the issue you need fixing is; if you
>     want
>     filenames to be artist - track, you can set this up in the options. Go
>     to File Naming, and then just change the two top fields to
>     "%artist% - %album%"
>
>     Is this what you're needing?
>     - Ollie
>
>     On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 13:24 -0500, Will Holcomb wrote:
>     > I was looking at the new QT tagger and was wanting to generate a
>     > playlist for an album. I have quite a few individual songs from
>     iTunes
>     > and Magnatune, and my music collection is more song based than album
>     > based. I'd like to be able to have the filenames uniformly be
>     "artist
>     > - track" based with playlists to denote particular albums rather
>     than
>     > naming using track numbers.
>     >
>     > Is there playlist support I am just missing it? If it is not
>     present,
>     > is there a specific reason?
>     >
>     > Will
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