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Comment by aaronem | Hacker News Reader

I'd try something like that, but most of what I listen to is from the common-practice era, so the quantum of content is not an individual file, but a playlist. "Shuffle" therefore doesn't work for me; what I really need is a player whose playlists can contain either individual files or other playlists.

I wouldn't have thought this would be all that outré a desire, but apparently everyone who's ever implemented a music player disagrees with me...

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Foobar 2000 has a 'Shuffle Albums' mode. I guess other players would too.

Even if your music doesn't quite fit into that box, it could be abused to do what you want (multi song collections turn into albums given the same album name, a single file has some other album name so is it's own album).

I made sure to check that the mode respects order within the albums.

Edit: And you can tweak the album grouping, so you wouldn't have to destroy album tags to make it work, just use some custom tag for the grouping.

I should've mentioned earlier that I've run across that and found it not really suitable for my purposes; I have close to a hundred gigabytes of music, much of which is not properly tagged so that "Shuffle (albums)" does what I want. It's also not broken down into directories by piece (a lot of it's in FLAC/CUE-per-album format, and one album usually contains several pieces), so "Shuffle (directories)" wouldn't work either.

I appreciate you taking the time to mention it, though, all the same.

Edit in re: to your edit: True, but even so, I can't see a way of making that work that doesn't involve many hours of manual tagging effort, which is something I'm sort of trying to avoid.

Yeah, bad tags are a problem and they aren't any fun to fix.

I would think that you could mechanically recognize many of the multi track pieces though (and then just dump some identifier in a grouping tag). So it's "just" a scripting problem, at least if you ignore finding decent and reliable libraries to do the tagging.

Sure, I could do that, and I don't mind driving command-line tools to do the tag modification so that's no real problem, but even with a 99.9% success rate, the size of my music library makes manually fixing up the ones that don't come out right a considerable task -- to say nothing of identifying them in the first place, another problem which doesn't really admit of easy programmatic solution.

In theory, I suppose I should just block out a weekend day or so, put on my headphones, and bite the bullet. But being able to add playlists, as playlists, to playlists, would neatly solve the problem without requiring me to spend a day engaged in such drudgery, and would offer other UI benefits besides. What I've got right now works well enough to be going on with for most of my purposes, and I suppose I just keep hoping someone will come along and satisfy my now rather forlorn hopes as to the rest.

There is a niche for some kind of service to fix tags and file names.

I too have many GB of files with odd file names and bad tagging, and I'd love a sensible way to fix it.

I never decided I trusted the default MusicBrainz tagger, but they are working on the problem.

Beets was posted here a while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7337021

http://beets.radbox.org/

It can pull data from MusicBrainz and people seem pretty happy with it in that thread.

Not sure if you're on the OS X / iTunes ecosystem...

You can have a playlist that is made up of other playlists by creating a smart playlist and adding a rule that includes songs from source playlists of your choice. This will atomically include any changes you make to the source playlists.

I manage my music with genres — and to a large part, stay away from smart playlists — however they can be a powerful feature.

I no longer have an OS X box, but I do have iTunes installed on my Windows machines in support of various pocketable devices of Cupertinian provenance.

I've never actually tried using iTunes as a music player, so I didn't know about the capability you describe, and I appreciate you pointing it out to me.

Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as though it would satisfy my requirement; while I can see some use in an automatically updated playlist consisting of tracks from the playlists I designate, almost all of my (near 100GB) music library consists of pieces which are broken up into a single track per movement. This being the case, it doesn't sound like a smart playlist would solve the "shuffle" problem of jumping from (e.g.) one piece's third movement to another piece's second, any more than any other sort of playlist does.

If I can define a smart playlist whose members are other playlists, of course, that's a different matter, and I'll have to take a look and see whether I actually can do that. It doesn't seem too likely, though; as I said elsewhere, I'm not sure why the idea of a playlist containing other playlists is so apparently strange to music player implementers, but I've yet to find anything with the capability. (I'm not sure whether they're afraid of graph cycles, but I'm also not sure whether those would actually pose a problem, and even if they did, it shouldn't be too hard to exclude them by checking at "add to playlist" time and refusing to complete the task if it would create a cycle in the graph.)

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