Let media player handle playlist

[RXWatcher]

I've been kinda cheating and using two media streamers..Subsonic and Kplaylist. One feature I love on Kplaylist is that you download the playlist to the player(ala winamp). You can then use winamp to control the order of the playlist..save it to disk and reload it. It requests the song from kplaylist one at a time. It's a pull from kplaylist, not a push to the workstation like subsonic.

You can also use winamp to skip within a song(if you don't use LAME) so you can skip to the end, etc.

I just like having my playlist local vs on subsonic...now subsonic rocks in most places(layout, user management, speed) but this one issue has me using kplaylist. It's faster, easier to manage the playlists through winamp.

Sindre, I can give you access to kplaylist if you want to see how it works.

[sindre_mehus]

Hi there,

I would love to check it out, so if you could send the details by mail or PM, that would be great!

I agree that the lack of client-side playlist management is one of the weakest point of Subsonic. FYI, I've just started working on a Flash-based Subsonic client which hopefully will address some of those shortcomings.

Take care,
Sindre

[tberman333]

I may be wrong here, but wouldn't this be solved if Subsonic created an actual m3u file that contained locations of the tracks on the server as the playlist, this would solve the problem. The m3u file could just be called subsonic.m3u and overwrite itself each time a new playlist is created.

I may be way oversimplifying this, but that seems like it would work.

As an example, if you look at the "Live Music Archive" at archive.org and go to any recording on there and play the m3u file, it plays the tracks from the server, but you can manage the playlist on your local machine.

Here is an example of one:

http://www.archive.org/download/soulive ... 16_vbr.m3u

[sindre_mehus]

You're right, that would work. The problem with that approach, however, is that modifications to the playlist in the web interface (jumping to different track, reordering, adding, removing etc) wouldn't be reflected in the client-side playlist.

Hm, maybe it could be configurable on a per-player basis whether the playlist should be managed on the client or the server. Then, the user can choose what he or she prefers. I'll give it some more thought.

Thanks,
Sindre

[tberman333]

You're right, that would work. The problem with that approach, however, is that modifications to the playlist in the web interface (jumping to different track, reordering, adding, removing etc) wouldn't be reflected in the client-side playlist.

Hm, maybe it could be configurable on a per-player basis whether the playlist should be managed on the client or the server. Then, the user can choose what he or she prefers. I'll give it some more thought.

Thanks,
Sindre

Another place this would help is streaming via a cell phone. If you had a place in subsonic where you could click to play the m3u file, it would download and play on a cell phone rather than needing to enter the player address in the phones media player. Just another thought...

If you decide to do this, I for one will be very happy

[RXWatcher]

This would be so cool...esp if you have a choice of how to you want to run it.

You take for example my wife who has to have every song she likes in one massive playlist of 5000-6000 songs...manipulating that is quite a challenge through subsonic and I'm sure it taxes resources. If we can offload that to the client then it'd free up resources on the server side.

[sindre_mehus]

Ok, so I've added a new option under "Settings > Player" called "Playlist is managed by player". If this is selected, the m3u playlist which is sent to the player contains one entry for each song (like in kplaylist). I've also added support for HTTP byte range requests, meaning that it will be possible to skip within a song (as long as it's not being transcoded or downsampled).

I'm quite happy with the result

Thanks,
Sindre

[RXWatcher]

I'll watch for a beta so I can test it.

[braddyo]

Great idea. Back in the days that I used Orb that was a feature I really enjoyed. For some reason they took that feature out, but it was sorely missed.