[API Request] generic song list/query

[zacaj]

Type of change

API extension

Proposal description

New to this project but I was trying to implement some utilities and quickly ran into some cases where it doesn't seem to be any way to look up song(s) via certain fields or combinations. It seems like the only reliable way to even list all songs is to use search3 with a blank string? And for other fields, such as album/artist, there are specific endpoints, even though there doesn't really need to be.

Some examples of similar requests regarding song lists/searching:

• [API Request] Language and Country filter #173
• [API Request] Endpoint to fetch song list (getSongList2) #18
• [API Request] Endpoint to retrieve metadata about multiple songs at once #6

One of those even has a discussion about wanting to plan a more general endpoint but it seems to have died...

The /search endpoints aren't really useful for this since they seem to be designed for free text search (eg, what a user would be typing in the UI), and they don't even have a strong specification of how that search should work.

It seems like, at a minimum, there's an easy case to be made for an endpoint that would return (paginated) a list of songs where a given field matches a given value. (where the field could be any of the ones returned by /getSong right now)

A small addition that would cover a lot of potential use cases (such as 'get songs in bulk') would be if, instead of a single value, it took an array of values.

Obviously this can be scope creeped to any degree necessary until you support arbitrary AND/OR, negation, or full SQL queries, so some balance needs to be struck between how powerful it is and how much work it is for the various servers to implement it. But I feel like at least something on the level of "get songs where = <value(s)>" shouldn't bee too high on that scale compared to any other specific 'get' endpoint

Backward compatibility impact

No response

Backward compatibility

• No backward compatibility impact.

API details

Parameters:

• field (string), one of the fields on a Song response (or maybe free text if tags are going to be supported more in the future)
• values (array), the value to look for on field

Returns:

• songs having a field with one of the provided values

Security impacts

No response

Potential issues

No response

Alternative solutions

Some more standard querying language like lucene, etc

[Tolriq]

It's not dead l, just waiting for other things first.

[loganank]

This would be great to have :)

[gravelld]

It would be useful to have this for other types - albums (get all compilations, get by release type, get all for a record label etc), artists (get by role)...

[Tolriq]

This is the plan :) Go talk in the transcoding PR to then be able to move on this next one :)