[API Request] Edit smart playlists

[raphmim]

Type of change

API extension

Proposal description

My apologies if this isn't the right place for it.

As a user of OpenSubsonic servers and clients (Navidrome, Feishin, Symfonium, Supersonic), I am trying to start using smart playlists. But the inability to edit those playlists from clients is a big obstacle to using smart playlists at all. As a user, my hope is to be able to create, edit, and delete smart playlists from any client, similarly to regular playlists.

I don't know if this is doable but it would be an incredible improvement!

Backward compatibility impact

No response

Backward compatibility

• No backward compatibility impact.

API details

No idea, sorry

Security impacts

No response

Potential issues

No response

Alternative solutions

No response

[dweymouth]

Yes, I would love for there to be a smart playlist API in OpenSubsonic so I can implement a smart playlist editor in Supersonic. And OpenSubsonic will really need to add one or else the alternative will be switching to Navidrome's native API once it is made stable and documented, and then we will have ecosystem fragmentation again. The challenge will be in designing an API that is generic and extendable to multiple different filters depending on what each server supports.

[Tolriq]

This is actually not the hardest part as we'll need the same kind of handling for the getXXX with all possible filters and sorts anyways. Either server ignore unknown fields or we have endpoints to list supported field with types.

The difficulty is defining the limits of the smart filter system itself like groups inside groups inside groups .... to have an API that is powerful but not too complex for servers to be afraid to implement it.

[acroyear]

one of the issues is that there's not really support for full ID3 tags in subsonic and its spin-offs. i once tried to add support for work/composer/conductor for a classical music and it was a pain in the arse and i gave up.

so that limits the filtering down to genre plus artist/album/music-directory.

it is still pretty powerful and I have wrote an external tool to create shuffled "radio" like playlists just based on what the API supports - https://subfiresuite.com/SubFire3PlaylistEditor - though I haven't really dived into genre support in depth because my genres are a total mess since every source for music tends to have their own idea of what to put. With 200,000 files across two servers, i'm never going to get around to cleaning it up.

[lachlan-00]

So i just had a look, i have 69 explicit search types just for song objects and the ability to add custom metadata to search as well.

There is no way that any of us would be able to standardize search lists but I would think you could alter search into a new endpoint for rules and a new endpoint for searching that alters query might be easy to do

The idea would be if you want to create a rule list you call the rules endpoint for your search type. but you can always search with the valid rules if you know them.

You would also have to provide a list of combined rules for all search types to allow group searching something like this:

• Endpoint: advancedSearch
  • query: string[] - array of query strings, ruleName/querystring
    • e.g. query=artist%2Fnofx&query=album%2Fpunk_in_drublic
  • type: string - result type (includes group searches like music, podcast, video types and ALL)
  • limit / limitArtist, limitAlbum, limitEtc: int - limit of object results
• Endpoint: getSearchRules
  • type: string - the object type to get rules for.
  • return: array{rulename => rule description} for display in lists

I'm not a client creator but being able to get a list of rules and send rules to a standard search endpoint would probably be the easiest way to do things, I can also add a standard list of rules to my types and map them to my search terms as well. (depending on conflicts)

[Tolriq]

Yes that's what Symfonium support and no one asked for more while this being a very highly used feature. And I'm sure highly used on Navidrome too, not sure @deluan covers their usage with his new reporting stuff.

Adding more levels makes the interface very complex on smart phones anyway.

[lachlan-00]

This is a discussion for smart playlists that are a different beast. The rules are field based and the fields are well defined in the API so the definition is easy.

not really, a smartplaylist is the same as a saved search using multiple rules. you can have a list of default or inferred rule names but most servers won't have the same names for everything.

The client needs to be able to pull all valid rules somehow (or the client uses a defined default list)

and then the client can search using these rules and the server will alter rule names to match their own names.

from these 2 methods you add a editSmartPlaylist endpoint that uses these rules and parameters. the server ignores rules that don't match and will be removed from the edit.

Doing it this way would allow more advanced searching as well as editing smart lists which are just song searches anyway.

[Tolriq]

Yes a smart playlist is a saved search with multiple rules. But it's saved, have limits and order(s) ;) Search by itself can use different parameters and will work on more things, you can search with advanced filers on artists, albums, ... those correspond to parameters passed to the endpoints that list or search those specific type of media.

While the concepts and the way the filters are defined should try to match, they are 2 different things targeting 2 different needs.

[paulijar]

Well, there's no reason why search couldn't have limits and orders, too. This is how I show the advanced search on the web UI of Nextcloud Music:

So in the end, the only clear difference is that smart playlist is always about songs while the advanced search result may be some other entity types, too. In Nextcloud Music, I have also the separate "Smart playlist" feature which is way simpler and easier to use but also much more limited. The smart playlist is also always ordered randomly. But those are just design choices I have made and certainly not the only possibility.

[Tolriq]

IMO search in Subsonic have 2 meanings.

1. The search endpoint that search in all media types
2. The listXXX endpoints that should allow filtering and sorting and paging. (I prefer to define that as filter to not mix the 2)

With the current global search approach of Subsonic you can't really pass orders and filters as they are specific to each types.

IMO search is not the proper place in Subsonic to apply those filters and everything.

Filters on the list endpoints are similar to smart playlist and their functioning should be similar yes.

So i think this is more a wording / definition of the features here.

Smart playlists is based on smart filters. Smart filters can be applied to list endpoints.

Search is something completely different.

So while current list endpoint does not properly support filtering and sorting and are in my plans, they are the target for those smart filters. Not the current search endpoints.

[raphmim]

@deluan any thought on adding support for editing smart playlists into the API?

[deluan]

I think it would be a great addition to the API, but I currently have no bandwidth to work on a proposal.

[acroyear]

I've been maintaining an external 'smart playlist' system ("SubFire Radio") for a while now. It is more a playlist generator for shuffle purposes, with an additional feature that you can keep an "album" (either ID3 album or a music directory) sorted in order and grouped together. This was to support my classical collection, being able to keep all 4 parts of "Beethoven's 5th" together and in order, for example.

The biggest issues I have are

1. the limitations on what ID3 tags are available (since Subsonic started with ID1 and even going to 2.X didn't really add many additional things),
2. the lack of standardization on multi-genre - yes there's a standard now but a lot of apps don't support it properly (incl iTunes last I looked), and
3. the fact that my very VERY large collection has so much chaos in its genre tags due to the variety of sources I've gotten my files from. just totally not reliable at all and it would take me months to clean it up.

So as such, I've not gone beyond what SubFire Radio provides. If OpenSubsonic were to recommend a smart playlist system, it would also need to recommend more general ID3 v2.x support to make it useful, including standardizing multiple genre tagging. As such a standard is established, publishing recommendations for software (preferably open-source) for helping to re-organize would also be valuable.