MMA Search and Sort a playlist - Poor man's AutoPlaylist idea

[MikeGahrns]

I know that AutoPlaylists are on the MMA to do list (and have been for years). While we wait, allowing the user to sort and search a MMA playlist that is on their phone would go a long way to solving 80% of user scenarios with maybe 20% of the work.

I create a ton of playlists on my computer for specific occasions, such as driving, skiing, etc. The playlists are curated (e.g. the order of the songs are thought out so that songs transition well). I also use InheritChildPlaylists as an autoplaylist that “collects” all of the songs from my main collections of various playlist types. Eg. Skiing, Driving, Relaxing

When I sync my phone it is great that on the phone I get a static playlist of the autoplaylists I have on my computer. Eg. all songs from my driving playlists. But the problem is that this can be thousands of songs in the static playlist that ends up on the phone. Often when on the phone, I will want to refine things like get only classic rock, or sort by date added, or songs with a low play count, etc.

There is no way to do this on MMA on the phone, and it becomes unwieldy to create all sorts of MMW permutations of autoplaylists on the computer. E.g. Autoplaylist of Driving Songs Ratings 4+, Autoplaylists of Classic Rock, rating 3+, AutoPlaylist of Songs Recently Added, etc

At home on my computer, I use MMW to continue to add new songs to my collection. As I do this, I curate and classify them and add them to my playlists. I then sync my phone to get new songs I add via MMW and also any new curated playlists.

This is great in that after I do a sync, the phone gets all of songs from playlists I have added along with the playlists. On the phone I can choose from any of the hundreds of playlists I have. But at times I want to go the “root of the playlist” to see all of my songs of that playlist type and only play what I am feeling like at the moment. If MMA had a way to search/sort that static playlist on the phone (that was downloaded from a MMW autoplaylist with inherit child playlist on) I would be happy. I wouldn't need that critera of the search/sort I did on the phone playlist be replicated back to my computer. When ever I do something on the phone, it tends to be throw away spur of the moment. It is the work I do on the computer that is my main master repository.

A simple example with a little more explanation and details….

On my computer with MMW I have something like:

Auto Drive Playlist (InheritChild Playlist)
Drive Playlist1
PL1 Song1
PL1 Song2
Drive Playlist2
PL2 Song1
PL2 Song2
…
Drive Playlist n
PL1 Song1
PL1 Song2
PL2 Song1
PL2 Song2

With MMW on my computer using an AutoPlaylist (with InheritChild) it gives me an autoplaylist that grows and keeps all of the songs I have in the various child playlists (without duplicates). This works beautifully and as my collection grows it seamlessly ingests the new songs and playlists.

What I am suggesting is since with MMA all of the songs from the synced autoplaylist already end up on the phone in a static phone playlist, just allow the user to refine that playlist on the phone by excluding/including songs/sorting from within that phone playlist.

In other words, on the phone you are not constructing a new autoplaylist on the fly from all songs on the phone, you are just applying a restriction to the set of songs in that phone’s selected playlist. This would simplify things a lot (e.g. you would not need to sync your autoplaylist criteria back to MMW on the computer, and you wouldn’t have “race” conditions where you edit the MMW auto playlist criteria and the MMA auto playlist criteria and you need to decide how to merge and which changes to keep, etc.)

[MikeGahrns]

Furthermore, it would be great if you could save the sort/search criteria you are applying to the static playlist so that you didn't have to construct on the phone all the time.

Give the sort/search criteria a name and save it to a list of presets to apply:

Save Search/Criteria:
"Classic Rock 4 Stars"
"Recently Added"
"No Rap"
etc.

[rusty]

Thanks for the feedback!

Improved views/sorting is one of the main features planned for 2.2. It's not specced yet, but I've added your feedback to: https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=11293

-Rusty