MediaMonkey forum

I use playlists to organize audiobooks into series. To facilitate this I have a single "Books with Series" Playlist that is the parent of an ever increasing list of sub-playlists representing book series. I have another list "Books without Series" with all books that are not part of a series.

I have another auto-playlist "Books to sort" that searches for all audiobooks in my library and filters out those that are not in "Books without Series" and are also not in any of the sub-lists in "Books with Series".

The problem is that I have to repeatedly update my query every time I add a new series.

It would be useful if the there was a version of the "Playlist (is/is not) (list of playlists)" criteria that also matched in any child playlists recursively.

This is not possible, you may want to look into Collections instead.

As a software developer of 25+ years experience I find the claim that this is not possible to be suspicious. I don't see an obvious way to use Collections make things simpler than the hack I am using now.

Collections have Albums as sub-nodes. So if files match the Collection Criteria, they'll be included automatically (no need to create a Playlist per Audiobook in the first place), and Albums would substitute the Audiobook specific Playlists.

If you still want Playlists you can use Collection as a Filter.

I cannot use "Album" instead of series, because Album is already used for the Book Title.

You can use Series as well in the Media Tree.

'Series' is equivalent to 'Albums' (it's just a different label), so it probably wouldn't help.

I wonder, though, whether a better alternative would be to improve the utility of the 'Grouping' field. e.g.
- For audiobooks, add 'Grouping' to the main Properties tab
- Add support for a grouping node
- Add support for Groupings in the Browser view

This would have the added benefit that Series data would be saved to tags.

Just a thought...

-Rusty

Maybe this helps?

https://www.mediamonkey.com/addons/brow ... playlists/

@Andre_H thanks for the pointer. I have tired that plugin, and I think it does as much as anything can. Unfortunately it requires the parent playlist to be an Auto-playlist, which means it does not show up in the "Send To" context menu, which is the best way I have right now to add books to a series. It isn't impossible, just not ideal.

I've tried to request a feature like @rusty described, but was told (similar to this one) that it was impossible.

What I would really love is some way to set up multiple hierarchical ordered trees/lists to describe structured information like:
for media (this structure is based on trying to organize some classical composer collections

or
Ideally at each level we could order the sublevels/items, and items could have multiple entries.

In Metadata these could be stored like: With each track holding its own info.

tletnes wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2024 4:02 pmI've tried to request a feature like @rusty described, but was told (similar to this one) that it was impossible.

iiuc, Lowlander wasn't saying that implementing such a feature is impossible, but rather that what you were asking isn't _currently_ possible in MM.

I added the 'heart' in the header to remind us to look into this after the 5.1.x release.

-Rusty

also see https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewt ... 76#p482576 and https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=17995 @rusty. something similar is already listed on mantis.

Hi,
I specify similar thing loong time ago https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=5418

Maybe all should be collected as MM has changed a lot meantime and new joined bug cleared of excessive features.

tletnes wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2024 4:02 pm @Andre_H thanks for the pointer. I have tired that plugin, and I think it does as much as anything can. Unfortunately it requires the parent playlist to be an Auto-playlist, which means it does not show up in the "Send To" context menu, which is the best way I have right now to add books to a series. It isn't impossible, just not ideal.

You are right, the Inherit Child Playlists add-on requires the parent playlist to be an Auto-playlist. That is a known fact mentioned in the Requirements and Limitations section of the addon-s web page, which is implemented like that because of technical reasons. For example, it is almost impossible to have one static parent playlist to inherit and contain files from all its children and still to know which files belong to itself and to any child individually, in case that you want to remove any particular child playlist.

I don't know the hierarchical structure of your list, but I don't think you would want to add books to a series by specifying the parent playlist in the Send to > Playlist menu. I suppose what you want is to specify a static playlist that is a child of the auto-playlist set to inherit its files. So, the problem is caused by the lack of Send to / Playlist option of the program.

The real question for MM developers is: why Send to > Playlist doesn't display static playlists that are children of auto-playlist:
https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=21101

Hi,

ZvezdanD wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2024 1:43 pm The real question for MM developers is: why Send to > Playlist doesn't display static playlists that are children of auto-playlist:
https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=21101

Good catch Zvezdan.

I also organize my music similarly to what tletnes describes. I think having more criteria for the Playlist property when creating AutoPlaylists as described in https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewt ... p?t=102132 could help a lot of people who organize things similarly.

I think that part would be relatively simple, but the thread quickly diverged into something much more complicated like what the "playlist in main window MM4 add-on" does. While I would love to see something like that in MM5 it would be a lot more work.

Adding "baby" steps like just allowing more playlist criteria in the autoplaylist generation would be a great first step that helps a lot of people with not too much effort.