Better album library management

Well done to all contributors to the Volumio project - great work!
I would like to see better album management in Volumio - with the possibility of storing album art, information, lyrics, organising albums with multiple disks and albums in boxed sets, track groupings (where a number of continguous tracks in an album are grouped into a single unit which can be played in its entirety), etc. Support for album .nfo files would be nice, as would be better support for the cue + single-file flac/wav format.

The biggest issue with most of your requests is that Volumio is based around mpd, the Music Player Daemon. mpd is the bit of Volumio that handles album/track management and metadata, Volumio is just a nice front-end interface to mpd.

Album art is already stored in the latest version of Volumio, so I don’t really know what you’re asking for here?

Some of what you’re suggesting may be able to be achieved through the use of “stickers” in mpd, which are just additional pieces of information that mpd itself doesn’t store - so things like sleeve notes, lyrics and so on may be stored as stickers. Bear in mind, though, that Volumio is designed to be run from RAM, and adding another database into the mix may be too much to run everything in RAM, especially on embedded platforms with limited memory like the Raspberry Pi.

Most of the other things you’re asking are outside of mpd’s limitations (AFAIK), so the only solution would be to get those features added to mpd itself, or for Volumio to be re-written from the ground up using its own music management and playing engine - neither of which are likely to happen any time soon.

As for multi-disc albums, my own personal preference is to combine them into a single large album and use the MP3 disc number tag to identify discs and renumber tracks so that second or third discs just follow on sequentially from the previous disc’s track numbers. I’m happy with doing it that way, mainly because (a) I don’t have many multi-disc albums, and (b) those that I do are meant to be listened together anyway. YMMV, of course, but that’s my solution :slight_smile: