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Topic: trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list (Read 5253 times) previous topic - next topic
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trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

I really hate this playback behavior and can't seem to control it.
what i want to do is be able to browse to an album in the album list, start playing it, and then browse the rest of the directory to see which songs i have or may want to listen to. But while my original selection is playing and gets to the end of a song, whatever I happen to be viewing in the album list starts playing. I want my original selection to play the entire album while I browse the collection or my playlists.

I've tried all (I think) combinations enabling/disabling the "playback follows cursor", "cursor follows playback", and Prefernces>General, disabled/enabled "Change selection with cursor when 'playback/cursor follows playback is enabled'" setting.

Oddly none of these seem to have any effect at all to this annoying problem. Have I not hit on the right combination? Is this just not possible to do in foobar? It is one of the two or three things in foobar that keep me looking for other media manager/players.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #1 –
Try this.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #2 –
er... now it's working as I want it to - for now. I de-selected everything under the Playback toolbar menu and de-deselected the Preferences>General> "Change selection with cursor ...'" setting.  coulda sworn I had done that already. jeez.  sorry for the bandwidth. now on to tinker with other issues

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #3 –
What I do is I have a dedicated playlist that I call "Now Playing". I select the songs I want to play in the Library playlist and right-click Utils> Send to Playlist, chosing Now Playing in the dropdown.

I also removed the context menu item Add to Playback Queue because I, personnally, think this is a misnomer, it should be called Switch Playlist because that's what it does, after the current song is finished foobar will switch to the other playlist starting on the song you chose to "Add to Playback Queue". In my scheme I would never want to do this.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #4 –
Arrgh! (and I'm not a pirate for Halloween). I set it up the same way for my foobar on another PC and it does not behave as I want. And sure enough I come home tonight and playback is back to doing what it did - I can't browse the album list while playing an album or it jumps to and plays whatever I am looking at (I guess that means it is "selected").

So back to square one - is there a tried and true method that differs from what I have described that has already been explained on the forum? Or is this 'normal' and that cannot be resolved.

And I don't see how queuemanager is any help by its description. I don't want o build queues and am not sure i want to load that .net plugin anyway.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #5 –
I'm not sure if I understand your situation correctly but if you would like to be able to explore the album list without changing your playlist you can disable the option:

File> Preferences> Media Library> Album List Panel> "General" Tab>
  • Auto send to playlist:

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Yotsuya on
I'm not sure if I understand your situation correctly but if you would like to be able to explore the album list without changing your playlist you can disable the option:

File> Preferences> Media Library> Album List Panel> "General" Tab>
  • Auto send to playlist:

I'm sure that as a fairly new user I didn't describe it accurately. I do have that option disabled.  (Generally I 've looked for anything related to playlist or playback and disabled it. And oddly nothing has changed the behavior of foobar. I would have expected something noticeable to change even if it wasn't what I had hoped for.)

What I am hoping for is to select an album from the Album List (AL) Panel, click play, and have all the tracks of that album play while I "look at" other albums in the AL Panel.
I guess the problem is that when I "look at" (which is "selecting", I guess) a different album in the AL Panel, it puts it in the single column playlist and whatever is displayed there will play as soon as whatever current track is finished playing from my first selection.
I'm trying to get the first album to play all the tracks without having whatever is displayed in the playlist play.
mmm, that didn't sound much clearer.

The analogy is putting a CD in your CD player and listening to all the songs while you pull CDs from your shelves/floor/seat cushions and look at them. You can idly browse your collection while the CD is playing.

You did make me rethink what is happening when I 'look at' an album in the Album List panel and click the play button. And i'm thinking that foobar doesn't have a way to do this.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #7 –
Well first you need to decide how to let foobar know what to play and what not to play.  Here is a suggestion you may wish to explore.

- Create a playlist, lets call it "Playing" for the sake of argument
- Add content to the "Playing" playlist and start playing it.
- Set the browser panel to output it's results to a separate playlist, lets call it "Browser" for the sake of argument.
- When you find something in the browser playlist you like, right click on it and select Utils> Send to playlist. Then send it to your "Playing" playlist.
- Explore the browser all you like and the results will display on the "Browser" playlist but foobar should only play songs from the "Playing" playlist

If you would like detailed instructions on any part of that just ask. There are many ways to use foobar, I personally would simply browse through the album list without adding any content to any playlist unless it was what I wanted to listen to.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Yotsuya on
If you would like detailed instructions on any part of that just ask. There are many ways to use foobar, I personally would simply browse through the album list without adding any content to any playlist unless it was what I wanted to listen to.

Thanks Yotsuya. I will try some of these idea and see if they work for me. It seems like this would be using the playlist to browse through rather than the Album List panel. not sure why i can't just browse the Album List panel without it affecting the playback, but perhaps your suggestion will be ok. I'll have to experiment with it.
thanks again!

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #9 –
I was asking a similar thing a few days ago in this topic, but when using browser panel, and I didn't get a clear answer neither

Sending to a "now playing" playlist is an ok solution, but is kind of annoying having to right click, and all that.

Browser options let you choose the action to perform when double clicking. the ideal one would be "send to specified playlist an play" (eg. now playing playlist), but when I double click It does nothing.. and besides I don't know how to specify the playlist.. Album list panel does not have this option anyway.
The perfect solution, IMO, would be that all this media browsing panels would have an option to "send to 'MY PLAYLIST' and play", when doubleclicking. And when single-clicking it would just send the item to the panel's own playlist ( if auto-send to playlist is selected. I have it like that so I can see album art and stuff on single column playlist while browsing).

It's in fact weird how foobar manages playlists and queues and all that. well maybe not weird, but certainly not intuitive, and not at all similar to the others media players. I'm not ranting, I love foobar, but not finding a good and simple way to manage this "now playing" thing really bothers me

sune

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #10 –
sune,

I totally agree with you.  I came from winamp, where there is a sharp disctinction between what's in the playlist and what's in the library.  I could never get used to having to view your library through playlists, especially when browsing library means destroying the list you're listening to.  Up until recently, I only used foo for tagging and such, for as much as I wanted it to be my main player because of all the extra functionality.  But with this new singlecolumn UI that came out a little while ago I think you can get the functionality you're looking for.

The difference is that you can set singlecolumn panels to stick to certain playlists.  So where as the columnsUI jumps around and won't let you look at a playlist without activating it, singlecolumn lets you do as you wish while leaving everything else alone.

I only discovered this yesterday, so my setup right now is a total hack and looks like ass, but it's still a proof of concept.  Check it out here:
http://www.pfspear.net/foobar.jpg
Put a nice skin on that and it would be a lot more functional.

Basically, I've got two playlists, "Library" and "Playlist".  Library is tied to my playlist tree, which inspects the media library.  There is a singlecolumn panel set up with all the file details and such.  I can crawl through that and select tracks I want to hear, then send them to "Playlist". Then there is a separate singlecolumn panel set up to look at the Playlist, formatted in such to be more attractive when containing a shorter collection of files that are in a random order. 

Then, simply play the playlist.  You're still free to browse your library.  And if you WANT to, you can still play from the library.  It's a sweet setup.

There are some issue with it still, but I wanted to show you this to see if it would help you out.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #11 –
Probably the easiest way to do this is to find what you want to play in the album list, then middle click on it. This should put that artist/album into a new playlist and automatically start playing the first track, then you can continue to browse through the rest of the album list, without the music changing to the library view.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #12 –
I think I misunderstood how you are trying to use the browser panel.

As long as you have disabled the "Auto send to playlist:" option and do not manually send a track to your playlist through double, middle, or right click.. you should be able to browse your album list to your heart's content without affecting the playback of your playing playlist.

I thought you were intentionally trying to browse your results through a playlist, you do not need to.  If you are having trouble seeing the track information in your album panel maybe you need to create a custom view. For instance the "by album" default view should display the entire contents of your media library grouped by artist, then by album, then presented as a tracklist sorted in track order.

I can confirm I am able to load a bunch of music into a playlist, start playing that playlist, and navigate throughout my album list panel without affecting the playback of the playing playlist.

If you are continuing to have difficulty please re-explain what exactly it is you are trying to do and what behavior is not as expected. Screen shots help.


EDIT: Added above animated screenshot

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #13 –
i did mis-explain myself yet again.  yeah i can do what you said - disable the 'Auto send to playlist' and then browse the album panel list.
I figured out that what I want to do is browse the album panel list and also see the songs (from what I view in the album list panel) in the single column playlist and also see the album art in the album art panel. All this just from browsing the album list panel. and yet have an album playing "in the background".
(I don't have any screen capture software at the moment)

I think this goes back to Yotsuya's suggestion (which I haven't successfully implemented yet - haven't had time):
Create a playlist, lets call it "Playing" for the sake of argument
- Add content to the "Playing" playlist and start playing it.
- Set the browser panel to output it's results to a separate playlist, lets call it "Browser" for the sake of argument.
- When you find something in the browser playlist you like, right click on it and select Utils> Send to playlist. Then send it to your "Playing" playlist.
- Explore the browser all you like and the results will display on the "Browser" playlist but foobar should only play songs from the "Playing" playlist

I need time to work this out still. In the meantime i discovered a way to crash foobar which i posted in the support section.

trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #14 –
I think I have an acceptable solution - at least I'm tired of messing around with it.
I keep the 'Auto send to playlist' which sends an album to 'Library View'. fine, whatever.
then I right-click 'Library View' > Add to Playback Queue.
That album seems to play all the way through and I can browse the ALP which sends albums to the Library View (I assumed queued up) and I can see the songs in the SCP and in the cover art in Album Art Panel (AAP?).
For what it's worth, I have Cursor follows playback selected. In Preferences > Album List Panel, the autoplay on send to playlist is disabled.

Of course when that album is done playing in the queue, whatever happen to be next in queue in the 'Library View' playlist starts up, which can be a bit of a jolt after listens to some nice Mozart adagios and Audioslave blasts my speakers away.

see, I guess I was wrong earlier when I said I didn't want to build queues. gasp.
 

Re: trying to play an entire album while browsing the album list

Reply #15 –
This is the only player I've encountered that by default still has this stupid behaviour.

The solution (thanks), does work but it's convoluted and shouldn't be necessary.

I spoke too soon, the current album will keep playing but I can't see the tracks from a different album if selected in the Album list.
Honestly I think WMP is better in terms of playback UI behaviour.