[IDEA] Track preview

[mario74m]

Hi,

yesterday I upgraded to the 8.3.9 version of moode from 6.something, and while the previous installation was already excellent, I must say that the latest one really approaches perfection! It's so polished, with much of the glitches that used to annoy me gone, as far as I can tell. 

I have a low priority proposal that would make moode even better. It's something I'd call the "track preview" mode. I like to explore new music, and my policy is to download or copy new albums to a temporary place of my NAS. I'd like to be able to just browse to that location and play a track, without having to do a library update and "contaminating" the sorted library with the entry that I potentionally would not like and end up erasing in the end.

The alternative suggestion is to allow a "track preview" on an entry already in library, which would work like browsing to the library track and play it "in place", without adding it to the current playlist (I like to keep my playlist "clean" and tidy.  So the "preview" control could for example be implemented in a popup window with only basic track info, track position slider and possibly temporary volume control, without adding the previewed track to the playlist history, or affecting the global volume control. 

I'm aware it's potentially much work, maybe even breaking the current UI logic, but this subforum is called "feature requests", so ...

[Tim Curtis]

A Library update is required to get the tracks into MPD's database otherwise MPD won't know about them and they can't be searched, browsed, played etc.

You can used the "Saved searches" feature (on the Library dropdown menu) to create Library views but it may require the underlying folder structure to be setup in a certain way.

For example place tracks to be previewed in a folder separate from the folder containing your main collection.

/Preview
/Main Collection

Then use Quick search to filter on aeach folder and save the results as a "Saved search"

folder Preview
folder Main Collection

Finally use "Saved searches" on the Library dropdown menu to select and Activate a saved search.

Try it out and see if this approach works for your usage scenario.

[mario74m]

I see, but what I had in mind is more something in the line of exploiting the MPD's "arbitrary file playback". The line from the MPD docs that mislead me into believing thet it was possible to add a file not in database to the playlist (and delete it afterwards) was "Clients that are connected via local socket may add arbitrary local files (URI is an absolute path)". Of course, while the "moode MPD client" probably is connected via local socket, a file from NAS is not a local file, so that could pose a problem, but I thought that a workaround is possible. Or maybe I got everything wrong, in which case I apologize

[Tim Curtis]

I can look at the docs but how would you propose viewing files not in MPD database so they could be played?

Folder view in moOde is rendered using MPD database command named lsinfo.