Re: [emms-help] EMMS - mpd, browse and random album play

[Yoni Rabkin Katzenell]

address@hidden (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

>  * How do I browse Artists/Albums/Songs?
>
>    What would be a good place to start to implement such a browser?

Emms is rather track-centric. But nothing is stopping you from reading
the track information for each track and constructing any additional /
different view of the track information.

>    Can I steal something that exists and adapt it?

emms-playlist-mode.el and emms-streams.el both implement a graphical
interface to a list of tracks.

> Perhaps I just need to write some sort of "back end" to an existing
> browsing-system?

I don't understand exactly what a "browsing system" is, but I think that
it would be great if you write an emms-browse-mode.el or something to
"scratch your itch".

>  * When I haven't chosen something to play myself, I would like
>    "random album play". That is, when the playlist becomes empty, I
>    would like EMMS to select an album by random and play it.
>
>    Pseudo-something like this:
>
>      (defun asjo-play-random-album ()
>        "Select a random album and play it"
>        (let ((album (select-random-from-list (emms-list-all-albums))))
>          (emms-playlist-add-album album)
>          (emms-start)))
>
>      (add-hook 'emms-when-playlist-runs-empty 'asjo-play-random-album)
>
>    Does this sound possible/easy?

Emms does not partition tracks along the "album" axis. As I mentioned
above, it is rather track-centric. But supposing that you implement your
idea for a "browse-mode" which is more album and artist aware you should
not have a problem writing the above as an extention of it.

I personally store different albums in different directories, but that
is an artifical seperation and it would be wrong to assume that every
seperate directory is a different album everywhere. So it seems that
creating "album-objects" is the the Right Thing (TM). Good thing that
Lisp is so malleable!

> My elisp is slowly getting better :-)

Awesome. Good luck, looking forward to trying out neat stuff from you!