Playlist and Collection Improvements for Music Libraries

[goblin2k3 8]

I have started using playlists and collections extensively to make my large classical music library easier to navigate.

More specifically, I create playlists for individual works and add them to collections containing works of a particular type by a composer, for example “Beethoven: Symphonies”, “Mozart: Operas”, or “Bach: Sacred Cantatas”. I also add the albums containing those works to the respective collections.

This is a really useful feature for organizing a music library. However, there are a few things that I think could be improved:

1. Playlists and collections should be displayed separately on album and artist pages.
   
   Collections are not really a type of playlist. They are more like enhanced tags or categories. Displaying them together with playlists is therefore somewhat confusing.
    
2. Playlist pages should display the collections that contain the playlist.
   
   A “More Like This” section for playlists would also be useful, although that may be asking a bit much.
    
3. Song pages should not display collections merely because the song's album belongs to them.
   
   The album was added to the collection, not the individual song. There may be no relationship between a particular song and the collection at all.
    
4. The different album views on artist pages should also be available for playlists.
   
   For example, clicking “Albums” on an artist page displays all albums for which that artist is credited as the album artist. Similar views are already available for albums under “As Contributing Artist” and “As Composer”.
   
   It would be very useful to have equivalent views for playlists.
5. Artist pages should distinguish between playlists or songs where the artist is a contributing artist and those where the artist is only the album artist.
   
   At the moment, these are mixed together, which can be quite confusing. The same applies to songs.
   
   If I want to see all songs from an album where the artist is credited as the album artist, I can simply open that album. I would therefore prefer the artist's song and playlist sections to show items where the artist is actually credited as a contributing artist.
    
6. Collections should support MusicBrainz and Discogs IDs.
   
   Currently, collections can only be linked to TheMovieDB. For music libraries, it would be very useful to support external identifiers from music-specific databases as well.
   
   MusicBrainz has a dedicated “Series” entity which can be used to group releases or release groups, making MusicBrainz Series IDs a natural match for Emby collections.
   
   Discogs also supports series of releases. Although Discogs handles series within the same database structure as labels, allowing a Discogs series/label ID to be assigned to a collection would be useful as well.

[Luke 43138]

HI, I don't agree with all of these, but yes some of these make sense. Thanks.

[user24 409]

Hi, that’s some interesting ideas that you have suggested!

I also have a largish music library (not Classical though) and have been using Emby, for a few years now, to manage it. Mostly Artist/Albums based Collections, more so than Song Playlists. Presently, I have 900+ Collections, the vast majority being “Related Artists” groupings.

I agree with your point 1. It would be nice to have this separation. If you use the web client app via a browser, then there are some CSS workarounds to manually hide (e.g.) selected Playlists from the Included In row. To separate Collections and Playlists into two rows, via a workaround, is more difficult (I have tried – but have not succeeded - yet).

All your other points, I can understand where you are coming from, but a lot is possibly dependent upon how you are organizing to suit your preferences – so I can see possible pros and cons for the other points… everyone curates differently, I expect?

I’m not going to suggest how you should organize, but here’s some general suggestions that may be useful, if you haven’t tried them already:

• Creative combinations of Collections and Playlists PLUS Tags and Genres.
• Creative use of embedded metadata to import into the fields that Emby accepts.
• Use of smart playlists plugins (native Emby is coming)
• Use of Coverart and/or various badge plugins (I don’t use these myself)
• Use emojis and symbols in text strings to differentiate, group and display required info
• Use photo libraries for cross-referencing music collections (one of my current projects)

All the above points are mostly non-technical. All the below points mostly require web app, with varying degrees of difficultly:

• Explore various plugins and other tools developed by community members
• Use custom CSS within Emby (community members, and even AI, can be helpful)
• Use custom JavaScript, perhaps via browser extensions
• Create your own plugin (I haven’t advanced this far myself)

With the above (and more) Emby has a lot of flexibility. Just depends how far you want to go with it for yourself… Cheers!