General
Online Metadata Sources
Music Assistant relies heavily on metadata to work well and it gets this information from locally tagged files and online sources. The free online resources have limits and MA is often hitting those limits so further restrictions have been put in place. This means that:
- Online resources will only be queried on the (first) open or play of an item
- No more background scanning for missing metadata
- Users with local files that are badly tagged or without images in the music folders will see no more artist thumbs
- If a user has no album artist tag, we no longer try to look it up in musicbrainz
- Simply default to various artists if the album artist tag is missing in local files
The Library
The Music Assistant Library is a database containing details of the music which the user has indicated they are interested in listening to on a regular basis. It consists of information about Artists, Albums, Tracks, Playlists and Radio Stations which allows easy searching, display and cross referencing across the User Interface.
For local music providers all artists/albums/tracks/playlists are imported into the MA library when the provider is added and at each sync.
For streaming providers ONLY the SPECIFIC artists/albums/tracks/playlists that are in the streaming providers library (or favourites or however it is termed in the provider) will be imported into the MA library when the provider is added and at each sync. This means, for example, if you have an artist in the providers library but none of their albums then all you will see in the MA library is the artist with NO associated albums or tracks. You have to subsequently add albums or tracks to the MA library if you want to see them in the library views. Note you can toggle the library / streaming provider filter option to see all that is available in the streaming provider.
Note
If identical items (e.g. an album or track) have not been matched across providers or within a provider then select the item and using the ⋮ menu in the top banner select REFRESH ITEM
Favourites
As a further means of filtering the library, items can be marked as a "favourite". This is shown in the UI as a filled heart icon. Items are not favourited by default. You can see all items if you deselect the heart icon in the top menu.
The Queue
Each player has its own queue. Viewing the queue is done by pressing the button. This button can be found on the player bar at the bottom of the UI or for narrow displays in the NOW PLAYING view.
Selecting the PLAYED ITEMS option will show the previous items from the queue and selecting any will show a menu and this will allow a restart of the queue from that point.
A menu of options to control the queue is available for each upcoming track and is shown in the image above.
Note
What happens to the queue when the different types of items (e.g. album, artist, playlist etc) are added to it is configurable in MA SETTINGS>>CORE>>PLAYER QUEUES CONTROLLER
The options in the menu available in the top right is shown below. Repeat and Shuffle also have buttons at the bottom in the player bar (or in the NOW PLAYING view for narrow mobile devices).
Note
If a queue is paused for more than 30 seconds it's status will change to stopped
Playlists
Playlists must be stored on a provider. A music provider's playlist can only contain tracks from that provider. However, MA has a built-in provider with the ability to create playlists that have tracks from multiple music providers. In this case the playlist will be stored solely within the MA database. These options are automtically presented in the Add to Playlist dialog.
Playlists can be created or added to from various menus in the different views. They can also be created in the Playlist view by clicking on the icon in the top right.
Playlists which consist of tracks from the filesystem provider will be stored in the MA database.
User created playlists from streaming providers will be imported into the MA database and will remain synchronised regardless of whether changes are made from the MA UI or from the streaming provider's native applicatons.
Automatically generated playlists from streaming providers may be supported. See the specific provider documentation for further information.
MA automatically generates some dynamic playlists. These playlists will be updated at the sync interval set in MA SETTINGS>>CORE>>MUSIC CONTROLLER or they can be updated manually by navigating to the playlist and then the ⋮ menu in the top right and selecting REFRESH ITEM.