Can album playlists be played in partymode?
#1
In trying to work around speed issues related to .m3u playlists, I thought I'd create an album smart playlist based on user ratings. The playlist contains 170 albums representing about 2,700 tracks. Browsing the playlist is very quick. But when I try to play the playlist in partymode using the context menu, nothing plays. The dialog pops up saying it is filling glasses, but nothing happens after that. After waiting 5+ minutes, I tried to just play the playlist from the context menu. When using the play option, Kodi locks up without any notification. After waiting 5 minutes or so, the playlist eventually starts playing. 

Linked below is a debug log of me launching Kodi, attempting to play the playlist in partymode, and then just playing it via the context menu. This time it seemed like it only took 1-2 minutes before the playlist started playing. What's weird is the default partymode playlist only takes about 5 or 6 seconds to load, and it contains over 36,000 tracks. Can't figure out why other playlists take so much longer.

Is there anything I can do to improve performance, or is this just the way it is? Should partymode work for album playlists? FYI, my music is on a directly attached USB drive, not network storage.

Thanks!

pastebin.xyz/p?q=d01FQms

FYI, this is a large debug log and Chrome seems to choke on it...Microsoft Edge doesn't seem to have a problem with it though.
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#2
To be honest I never use .m3u playlists or partymode myself, so I would not have noticed any issues. That doesn't mean I can't help, just that you are going to have to describe and research more for me.

My first thought is that partymode is designed for songs playlists. I'm not surprized it choked with albums, and I should probably look into disabling it for other lists. Making it work for albums lists too would be more effort, and right now I just don't have time.

Partymode works well on songs smartplaylists. I know that if you have .m3u files all edited and ready to go that is not what you want to hear, but like you said on the other thread there are ways for user to work around this.
 
Quote:What's weird is the default partymode playlist only takes about 5 or 6 seconds to load, and it contains over 36,000 tracks. Can't figure out why other playlists take so much longer.
As you know Kodi is slow to display long lists of things, this is down to the fundamental design of how data is loaded into the memory that sits behind the GUI. It is not a db issue (I could fix that), but what Kodi does with the results set once it has it from the db. Partymode works completely differently.  Normal lists manipulate all  the songs locally before showing anything, partymode processes songs a small bunch at a time (and keeps a list of the IDs of songs it has already played).
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#3
Thanks @DaveBlake, appreciate everything you're doing for music and realize there's only so much time in the day. 

From a user perspective, since it is possible to play album playlists from the context menu, it seems like it should also be possible to play them in partymode. Song smart playlists aren't feasible for me, that would require setting user ratings on thousands of tracks vs 100-200 albums.
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#4
(2018-04-08, 17:34)braz Wrote: From a user perspective, since it is possible to play album playlists from the context menu, it seems like it should also be possible to play them in partymode.
Yes I agree, but unfortunately not how it was designed. The whole playlist concept could do with behaving more like partymode, that is lazy loading (or even just in time loading) of the song data. Big job!

I'm an album guy, I find the concept of mixing up songs kind of odd, but I'm old Tongue
(2018-04-08, 17:34)braz Wrote: Song smart playlists aren't feasible for me, that would require setting user ratings on thousands of tracks vs 100-200 albums.
I understand, rating songs is a thankless task too and the data is transitory (rebuild the library from scratch and it is gone). I wonder if we can come up with another approach?

What I don't get is why users (you are not alone) want to put more songs in a playlist than they can listen to in a day. Not saying that Kodi shouldn't be redesigned to show large lists of items faster, it could be browsing long lists of artists or albums etc., just not sure why people make long lists of songs to play.

Is what you want to do is take a group of albums, and then randomly play the songs from them? Do the albums have anything in common or are they simply in a .m3u file?
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#5
My library consists of full albums too, but I like to play my favorite albums on random. In this scenario, I would much rather play a large number of albums on random than a small subset. My library includes my wife's music, plus a lot of live/bootleg albums, so there's plenty I usually exclude from my regular playlists.

I've thought about segregating my library on disk, but it would quickly get difficult to manage with the same artist in multiple locations. And as far as I an tell, this wouldn't fix my speed issues because I would still need to create playlists based on the file path.

I'm not using .m3u playlists anymore because they are extremely slow to load, like 10+ minutes. Smart playlists are better, the one I referenced in the first post seems to load in a minute or two. Like you said, the way I play music would benefit from being able to play music playlists in partymode (lazy loading).

Thanks @DaveBlake
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#6
Keep in mind party mode also works for music video and mixed (songs + music video) smart playlist, as well as the "universal" party mode playlists.

If what you are after is to play complete albums in random order then what I do is create an album smart playlist with sort order random.  But you don't get just 10 songs at a time in the nowplaying playlist I guess which may be what you really are striving for to reduce load times.

scott s.
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maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#7
(2018-04-10, 04:13)scott967 Wrote: Keep in mind party mode also works for music video and mixed (songs + music video) smart playlist, as well as the "universal" party mode playlists.

If what you are after is to play complete albums in random order then what I do is create an album smart playlist with sort order random.  But you don't get just 10 songs at a time in the nowplaying playlist I guess which may be what you really are striving for to reduce load times.

scott s.
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Yeah, I know all the places partymode works, the point is that it doesn't work for album playlists, which would be a much used feature for me.

As I posted, I'm also using album smart playlists, but they are slow to load (though .m3u is much worse), without partymode.
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#8
Understanding people's usage is useful to me even if I can't fix anything immediately
(2018-04-10, 03:20)braz Wrote: ...My library includes my wife's music, plus a lot of live/bootleg albums, so there's plenty I usually exclude from my regular playlists.

I've thought about segregating my library on disk, but it would quickly get difficult to manage with the same artist in multiple locations. And as far as I an tell, this wouldn't fix my speed issues because I would still need to create playlists based on the file path.
With v18 having the same artist in multiple locations is no longer the issue it was for previous Kodi versions. Depending on folder layout for art and NFO location, although a good start point, was too simplistic a model. Liberated from that restriction means that using separate music sources for general categories of music e.g. wife's music, live stuff, the "why did I rip this", or Opera from daily listening etc., is an effective thing to do. The artist art and nfo files can go off in the nominated "Artist Informatuion Folder".

At the top of my list for new things (why did I spend all this effort on art I don't care about, when this is the feature I persoanlly wantHuh?) is better dynamic filtering of genres, artists and albums based on music source. By "dynamic" I mean easy to modify, not set in a custom node or playlist rule. But static filtering is already supported - file path rules can be used for artists, albums or songs.

So separate your music onto different music sources, then create smartplaylists of songs based on (source) filepath, and play that playlsit using partymode.

Well that's an idea anyway, be interested for you to try it.

(2018-04-10, 03:20)braz Wrote: I'm not using .m3u playlists anymore because they are extremely slow to load, like 10+ minutes. Smart playlists are better, the one I referenced in the first post seems to load in a minute or two. Like you said, the way I play music would benefit from being able to play music playlists in partymode (lazy loading).
I fear that long .m3u album playlists are a worst case, each entry being unpacked and fetched from the db separately hence it is even slower than just that number of songs in a list. Just-in-time data lookup would be a better approach for that kind of use.

Of course that kind of use - having a fixed list of things in a file - isn't making best use of the library either, selecting music by powerful and flexible criteria on the day. Not knocking it, but maybe gently nudging you towards a more dynamic approach to music selection in the years to come Smile
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#9
I'm just wondering if a tag could be re-purposed to do what you want, perhaps the Mood tag for example and give it a value such as Favourites, that should be dead simple to apply quickly to all the tracks for the albums you wish to contain in the SmartPlaylist thus allowing you to create a Song SmartPlaylist.
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#10
I do something like this

I have some albums set to genre "Omit"

then have partymode rules to not choose anything with genre Omit

But if you could use another tag such as Mood this would be a better solution, as I could set the correct genre for the non wife friendly tracks !!
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#11
I had never thought of playing entire albums randomly but now it has been suggested I'd certainly add my vote to a feature request to be able to do it sometime in the future, sounds a great idea
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#12
Thanks all for the suggestions. I think for now I'll stick with the album smart playlists based on user rating. The delay in playing them from the context menu isn't too bad. Eventually I will likely try @DaveBlake's suggestion to split up my music library on disk. Looks like it shouldn't be a problem for Bliss, which I use to manage tags/artwork. I hesitate to do this though, as making changes to the playlists would entail moving the albums on disk, cleaning the library, and rescanning.
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Can album playlists be played in partymode?0