I think it would be possible to do this with a plugin. The problem is
just to decide how to detect that two tracks belong together. 

I'm guessing that it should be safe to assume that they should be
played in track number order and that the tracks are on the same
album/disc ?

If that is the case it would be possible to store the information in a
tag in the file. If we don't like to depend on the Custom Scan plugin,
the only suitable tag available as I see it is the comment tag.

For example lets say (track 2 and track 3) and (track 5 and track 6)
should be played together, while track 1 and 4 should be possible to
play separately, something like this might work.

Track 1: TRACKNUMBER=1
Track 2: TRACKNUMBER=2, COMMENT=SEQ1
Track 3: TRACKNUMBER=3, COMMENT=SEQ1
Track 4: TRACKNUMBER=4
Track 5: TRACKNUMBER=5, COMMENT=SEQ2
Track 6: TRACKNUMBER=5, COMMENT=SEQ2

If implementing it with a plugin, it would check the current playlist
at regular interval. If it find a track that has a COMMENT tag that
starts with "SEQ" it would check if there are any other tracks on the
same album/disc with the same SEQ number. If there is, it would check
if these are shown together in the current playlist and if they aren't
it would insert the missing tracks in the correct position.

There is to my knowledge no safe way to detect who is adding a track to
the playlist, so it would work the same in both Random Mix and if you
added the track manually. The result is that it will be impossible to
play one of these tracks alone without also playing the sequential
track.

The plugin would probably have to check maybe the 2 or 3 first items in
the current playlist. The problem will be if just Track 3 is added, in
this case the music starts directly and the plugin would probably not
be able to detect track 3 fast enough. The result is that it would
insert track 2 after a second and the music would switch to track 2
after you have heard a second of track 3. I'm not sure if this is a
major problem though becuase it's probably a pretty rare situation that
one of these tracks end up being the first in the playlist directly when
you hit play. I think it might work fast enough on some system but not
on all. I know this since I know some people that are using the Custom
Skip plugin have seen issues like this.

Of course, if this was implemented inside SlimServer and not as a
plugin, it would be possible to have this handling when a track is
added to the current playlist. In that case there would be no problem
to make sure the above issue doesn't happen. As standard SlimServer
functionality it would also be possible to decide on a custom tag where
this information should be stored instead of using cryptical prefix
values in comment tags.

I'm personally currently too busy with other things, but if anyone
likes to try to implement this as a plugin I'll be happy to provide
more details.


-- 
erland

Erland Isaksson
'My homepage' (http://erland.homeip.net) 'My download page'
(http://erland.homeip.net/download)
(Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse,
Custom Scan,  Custom Skip, Multi Library and Database Query plugins'
(http://wiki.erland.homeip.net/index.php/Category:SlimServer))
------------------------------------------------------------------------
erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17312

_______________________________________________
discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss

Reply via email to