[Shiny!]

Something I've been curious about since I've seen it mentioned, but can't find any mention of in the documentation, what's it like to manage a queue on this thing, from a user experience standpoint? I'm used to using queue systems of varying quality (some of them pretty awful honestly  ) on phone and desktop apps, and the iPod's "On-The-Go Playlist", so I'm wondering if the Tangara allows for quickly adding and hopefully removing individual songs/albums from the queue, and what the controls are like for doing so compared to something like an iPod

I'm already backing it anyway (this thing is really cool ) so I'll end up finding out eventually either way, but it would be nice to have an idea before it shows up

[jacqueline]

At the moment our Lua bindings for queue management are pretty good, and our UI is pretty bad. This is one of those things where I keep looking at other similar music players to see how they do it, but I'm yet to see an implementation that I really like.

Right this second you can play individual tracks, or add a collated view from one of the database indexes. So e.g. you can add all tracks from an album, or all tracks from an artist (in album order, grouped by album), or all tracks with a particular genre. It's good enough for quick listening, but very barebones.

I think the main things we need atm are:

• some kind of long-press action that lets you add tracks to the queue in different ways (like play next, or adding a single track without replacing the current queue
  
• some kind of ui for managing the current queue (including saving, ideally)
  

...but how those UIs should look to make any sense to people is kinda hard

[redshift]

So e.g. you can add all tracks from an album, or all tracks from an artist (in album order, grouped by album)

If I'm reading between the lines correctly here, does this mean you can navigate by artist, then by that artist's albums, then add all tracks from an album?  And you can also navigate through albums by all artists?  That would be great.

• some kind of long-press action that lets you add tracks to the queue in different ways (like play next, or adding a single track without replacing the current queue
  
• some kind of ui for managing the current queue (including saving, ideally)
  

These will be great!  For music I stream, I use YouTube Music, and while there's a lot not to like, they do queue management fairly well, and it seemed rather intuitive.
* With an artist, album, song, or playlist, you can play or shuffle all tracks (replacing the queue)
* With an album, song, or playlist, you can "play next" to play it after the current song, or "add to queue" to play it after all queued songs, or "save to playlist" to append it to an existing playlist or inline create a new playlist
* With the queue or a playlist, you can drag individual songs to new places
* With a playlist, you can select multiple songs (usually an album) to remove
* With a song that's playing or in the queue or a playlist, you can "go to album" or "go to artist" to easily play more from them; songs in an album list only have "go to artist" of course
* With the library, you can scroll through playlists, songs, albums, or artists (which then allows an album list and song list)

There are some clear gaps there (and they do very little with genre) but it's pleasant overall.  My favorite trick is the links from songs to their albums/artists, and albums to their artists, because it makes it quick to listen to more by them, and most players don't have that feature.

Like you mentioned, I think Tangara long-press maps well to adding to the queue, somehow choosing next or at the end.  I also think the touchwheel could be great for scrolling multi-select, to allow quickly moving or removing tracks in the queue or a playlist.  (Holding down a direction in a "select mode" could work well, too.)  I often add multiple albums to a playlist as a reminder to check them out, and then I remove an album at a time after listening to it, so either having the ability to remove an album at a time or quickly multi-select would be great!

[jacqueline]

If I'm reading between the lines correctly here, does this mean you can navigate by artist, then by that artist's albums, then add all tracks from an album?  And you can also navigate through albums by all artists?  That would be great.

Yeah!

It's actually a bit more flexible than that on the database end; when we ingest tracks into our database, we pull out a bunch of each track's tags (title, artist, album, whatever). We then have a bunch of 'indexes' that are defined by an ordered list of different tags. Here: https://codeberg.org/cool-tech-zone/tang...ex.cpp#L31 (in theory these should be user-configurable, but atm they're hard-coded)

We then have a fairly generic 'index browser' UI that lets you view the top-level records associated with an index, and then for any given record, drill down recursively to browse the deeper level of the index.

...I hope that makes sense. It's a bit complicated, but it's quite a flexible and fast approach.

[neckspike]

also file browser? plz? I know I'm a little weird in preferring that but hopefully that's not hard to implement (also helps you find stuff if the tags are mangled)

[ailurux]

also file browser? plz? I know I'm a little weird in preferring that but hopefully that's not hard to implement (also helps you find stuff if the tags are mangled)

i also want this, it's on my list of features to get to pre-release (maybe we should have a proper roadmap somewhere...)

[jacqueline]

We do have a roadmap!! Kind of. Here: https://codeberg.org/cool-tech-zone/tangara-fw/issues

If people file bugs for stuff they want then I will certainly triage them into labels and milestones that we can then prioritise.

[mborus]

also file browser? plz? I know I'm a little weird in preferring that but hopefully that's not hard to implement (also helps you find stuff if the tags are mangled)

i also want this, it's on my list of features to get to pre-release (maybe we should have a proper roadmap somewhere...)

I'd also prefer to have a file browser.

Many things I listen to either have no tags or are non-music files (like podcasts) that would spam a artist/track focused database.

These are often one-time uses as well, like a podcast to listen to once and then delete.
The quickest way to locate them it is to remember where you put them on the SD card..

It would be useful to have a ".gitignore" style file on the SD card to exempt certain folders
from being indexted into a database.

[apfel]

+1 for the Ordered Catalogue + The Chaos Directories approach

[neckspike]

I have a tendency to have folders of random tracks of like, theme songs and stuff from various sources and just navigate to the directory. One player I had WAS NOT HAVING THIS and it sucked. I'm totally down with tossing a .gitignore in those folders or similar functionality to say "hey don't suck this mess up into the otherwise nice db of artists and albums".