This is largely a cross-post of ideas from this thread in the General forum.

The original request from Oli:

Is it possible when searching for a tune, to play that tune, then play the rest of the album where the track came from, starting from the next track in order.

Either that, or use search to jump to a track in the full playlist.

Also, to display the track number of a tune, relative to it's original position on the CD, not it's position in the playlist.

(I seem to be stuck with the Album/Track mentality mainly because most of my albums are mixed, and so shuffle sounds horrible... maybe it'll wear off after a while )


What Oli and others are getting at is the fact that while the Empeg frees us from the idea of having to switch CD's and think in an album-only mentality, sometimes, you just want to hear the album. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. So why can't the Empeg pretend to be a CD changer if we want it to?

How would this work? Well others will chime in, but here's my idea. Let's say you're shuffling through your tracks and "Mother" by Pink Floyd, which is track 6 on Disc 1 of The Wall, comes on. You think "wow, I haven't listened to The Wall in at least 3 or 4 days, I'd like to hear the rest of the album." What can you currently do with the Empeg as-is?

1. Browse manually to a pre-made album playlist for that album. Slow, tedious to maintain, not ideal.
2. Hit the "Tweak Source" button 20+ times. Unfortunately, your tracks probably won't be anywhere near in correct order. And if you weren't shuffling your entire player's contents, you won't get any "hits" with this feature. Slow, unreliable, not ideal.
3. Hit the search button several times to bring up a Source search. Unfortunately, similiarly-named albums (I have four albums named "Play" in my collection, for instance) will confuse this strategy. Furthermore, if you have your Source field filled out such that multi-disc albums like The Wall contain "Disc 1", "Disc 2", etc. you will have to do a search for each of these albums individually. Slow, unreliable, not ideal.

So what can be done? Well, right now, the player only has two constructs to organize music: Playlists and Metadata. As far as the Empeg is concerned, your "album" (Source field) is just another piece of metadata which is blindly matched in searches. You're not really grouping songs within a certain album, you're assigning a certain text string to each song which is indexed to give the appearance of belonging to an album. Duplicate "primary keys" so to speak break this, and typing in a search string is no small task in the car.

So Oli's idea (which may have been suggested before) is that it'd be sweet if you could hit a button, and your current playlist would remain intact, but it would automatically insert all of the tracks from the current song's album.

I would add to this that it would be real nice if it also added the *previous* songs from that album *before* the current song. So in my above example, when I hit this magic button, tracks 1 through 5 of The Wall Disc 1 are inserted before this track, and tracks 7 through 13 are inserted afterwards. Furthermore, in my dream scenario, all 13 tracks from Disc 2 would be added as well, because they're part of the same album. So if I wanted to browse back a few tracks in that album, I could do that (or start from the beginning.)

The way I would implement this if I had Emplode and player source code in front of me would be thus:

1. Introduce the concept of an album to the player's database format. Each track would belong to an album, not just have a Source field. The albums wouldn't have to be named, I'd just use a unique ID number for them internally.
2. Create a UI in Emplode in which songs can be selected and added to these albums. Possibly just by designating an album playlist as, well, an album playlist. Possibly by drag-and-dropping them into some list of album entries, but I don't like that as much as the album playlist idea.
3. Each track within that album would have a reference to the album in the database, which would in turn have references to each of the album's tracks (sorted.)
4. When listening to the track and you want to hear the album, the player just cross-references the track to the album, and tweaks the order with the album's contents.

So who else thinks this would work? Let's hear ideas, let's hear criticisms of this idea, let's hear it all. At some point I'd like to hear from Peter, Roger, Hugo and the gang on whether this idea is (a) good (b) feasable and (c) possible for a post 2.0 release.

I hope I managed to collect all the ideas from the original thread amongst my own ideas... If anyone from the original thread feels their idea got lost in my translation, please chime in.

Whew. My fingers hurt.