A couple of further enhancements?

[Pastim]

Until recently I mostly used LMS (Logitech media Server / Squeezebox) to play my mostly classical collection. All my systems are on linux, and until recently I didn't have a decent control point to make proper use of minimserver. I have now found upplay, which runs well on linux, so am using minimserver more and more.

There are a few things I miss from LMS. The main thing is random play across the whole or parts of my collection. No Control Point can do this because they have no concept of 'Works' (collections of tracks), or minimserver 'Groups', only tracks which they can then shuffle.

My thoughts on this are that I'd like to be able to do something like the following:

1) pick a top level tag called 'random', leading to the normal full list of tags

2) pick a tag as usual, and drill down to the level I want to randomise at (could be composer, conductor, artist, year, whatever....)

3) select either tracks, groups or works (or even albums?) as the level at which I want tracks to be grouped for consecutive play

4) select a 'randomise' item to create a randomised list of these groups

5) play the resulting list as usual in the Control Point (there might need to be a limit to the number of tracks selected since it could be a lot of the collection and might blow the Control Point)

Step 3 might be combined with step 1, depending on how the user interface works out best.

Is something like this totally impractical? I appreciate that people may say that this type of thing is the task of a Control Point, but, as I said above, I can't see that being possible unless Control Points become aware of track groups, which seems unlikely.


The other main feature I use in LMS is searches, but I can't (yet) see how that could be implemented in a server whose data entry is done by Control Points supplied by other developers.

Any thoughts?