Shuffle on album level

[TheOldPresbyope]

Shuffle-play by Album as opposed to shuffle-play by Track would be especially important for classical music listeners.
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If you change that to "shuffle-play by work/composition" then would I agree.
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Whether shuffling by "album" or by "work" is the choice, the question for me is, what metadata/track naming/file organizational structure would be the primary key? I really don't want to combine multiple tracks into a single file plus cuesheet to get there but I admit I've considered it in the past.

Regards,
Kent

I'm not sure what tag exists for a 'work.' What standard ID3 tag could be used for that? 

Yeah, that's the point, isn't it. MP3 tags originated in the pop music culture and ID3 "standardized" them. We're left to contort our tagging to fit in the sense that music playing apps can find what we want. That's why there are so many blog entries on the subject of how to tag classical music. 

The authors of the Vorbis Comment spec (used in FLAC tagging) were much kinder but without pre-defined field names to work with, one runs into the problem of getting music player apps to understand what is intended.

We do have the Album tag, though. I think one could make effective use of 'Shuffle by Album' if one could use a tag editor to make a multi-CD opera (for instance) into a single album. It's a kluge, but it would work. 

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As indeed I have done, exactly for my opera collection. Sadly, I first ripped a ton of operas using several different programs before I knew what mischief that would create and more recently I had to spend time "normalizing" their output in terms of file names and track metadata.

Now I'm going back and reorganizing/retagging other works, notably to break out single works from box sets and from albums which combine works by different composers but then everything else---should I live so long. In the end, I don't care if I have to call a work an album to be able to select it. I live with plenty of other contradictions in my life

I think we're basically in agreement here. This is true too about your companion post on composers.

Regards,
Kent

[swizzle]

The problem is javascript is client side and your client isn’t always necessarily running for the javascript to do its thing so something like this needs to be done on the back end running on the Pi which is Tim’s domain and he already has too many things to do and not enough time to do them.

That said we could use the music tab’s genre and/or artist columns to focus a prospective album shuffle so you could do just classical or whatever, we’d just need to pass those parameters to the back end for it to use to construct its pool of albums to shuffle through.

[Tim Curtis]

Oops, I forgot, these shuffle routines need to run on the server and not on the client. So a bit more complex.

[ICLlP]

Did this ever progress?

[Tim Curtis]

Did this ever progress?