15

edit: TheBlackCat has proposed a method of implementing the following idea with nested playlists a few posts down, which not only sounds awesome and satisfies my needs, but would totally evolutionize the collection as we know it. Go read his post instead.

There are tons of albums out there with single songs that spread over multiple tracks, or with short intro/ending tracks that go well with or fade into their neighbour tracks.

I would love to be able to select couplets (or triplets, whatever) of songs which should always be played consecutively, especially for selection by for random/dynamic playlists. It's often jarring to hear some songs out of order, or suddenly fade into the totally wrong song. Also, such tracks should always be played gapless, even if Amarok is set to cross-fading, so that it sounds identical to it's CD/Vinyl original.

Lemme pick some examples from my collection of songs that should go together:

Styx - Equinox: Prelude 12 and Suite Madam Blue
Muse - Absolution: Intro and Apocalypse Please
The Beatles - Abbey Road: Uh... all of side B (The Sun King Melody)
ELO - Eldorado - Eldorado Overture and Can't Get It Out Of My Head

And then there are the super short bumper tracks, like "Miracle Cure" from The Who - Tommy which is a 13 second long track of a paper-boy singing newspaper headlines... while I'd rather it not be picked at all in random track selection, I don't want to give it a bad rating because it's hardly even a song. But if I could just pair it up with the preceding or following track than it would at least be in-context, and not completely out of the blue. This probably goes a lot for musicals and operas, though.

Isn't simpler to simply join these files into one?

No, it wouldn't be because now you're editing your files, and your albums have the wrong number of tracks. And how would it search for lyrics? Plus a single file can only have one set of ID3 tags. Information like this is precisely the sort of metadata the collection is supposed to keep track of, just like user ratings, because it's arbitrary and specific to your collection and tastes, and doesn't involve modifying the source data.

Another way to think about this might be nested playlists. You can put a playlist in a different playlist. The containing playlist treats the nested playlist as a single song. Once the containing playlist reaches the nested playlist it enters that playlist and follows that playlist's playing rules until it reaches a stop condition, at which point it returns to the containing playlist. So if you set it random to off and repeat to none it will play through each song in the nested playlist and then return to the containing playlist. If you set it to random and play one then it will pick a random song from the nested playlist and then return the containing playlist. Of course if you set it to repeat then it would never leave the nested playlist, so perhaps repeating should be disabled. When you are adding song to a playlist you would have the option to add the songs to the playlist or add them as a nested playlist (which might be in the "more" area of the drag menu).

Voted for TheBlackCat take on idea, even though the original is good to.
That's very useful for (at least for me) classical music where a symphony or something similar is broken down on smaller movements...

Yeah, I think TheBlackCat nailed the right implementation to solve both of our problems! "Nested Playlists" sounds like just the sort of power-feature Amarok would bust out, and then we can laugh at media players that require users to edit XML in a text editor to get the same features.