Wishlist for classical music

[Paul Abrahams]

I'll admit it --my musical tastes are specialized.  I love a broad range of classical music -- and not much else.  So I see programs like Clementine through that lens.  There are two things on my wishlist that would be invaluable for classical music, but almost certainly far more widely useful.

1. Recursive playlists.   This is an obvious enhancement and probably not at all difficult for someone familiar with the procedures for modifying Clementine.  The idea is simple: an item in a playlist can either be a song or another playlist. My favorite example of a natural hierarchy in a library:

   Beethoven -> String Quartets -> Early Quartets -> Quartet #2 -> 3rd movement

But for a different domain, we might have:

        Performer -> Tour -> Concert -> Song

You get the idea.

The pseudocode:

 procedure play(item):

      if song(item) then perform(item);

      else for each x in item do play(x);

  end;

2. Configurable genres.  "Classical" is far too broad a genre; at least there should be a subgenre such as Oratorios. Every other musical genre will also have subgenres.

Ten years ago I would have taken on this project myself.  Alas, I'm too old now to be able to do it.  I'm hoping that someone in the Clementine community will be inspired to do what I am no longer able to do.

[Garthhh]

I don't hold genre to be sacred & feel free assign custom genres with wild abandon  
Use the group or comment field for each of the criteria you find important 
There are a bunch of logic tools/choices you can use to build smart playlists

Customizing the metadata that follows the files, will work on any player 
It makes your collection more versatile 

I'm not clear on how you want to listen to music or if you want it to display in a specific way?

I build a playlist of songs under 7 minutes, excluding a few genres: books, spoken word, jazz... 35000 gets reduced to 18000, randomize that playlist a couple of times, copy a 1-2000 songs onto to flashdrive or music player, delete those off the playlist, repeat
I spent a bunch of time chopping long cuts into 5 minute chunks, split at the quiet moments

I have mine, hers & ours favorites lists marked in the comment field
There are a bunch of options for how the library displays & even more for playlists

Clementine is mature, it does what it's going to do
The devs work on github doing bugs & such