This question has been raised many times, but given recent enhancements to HA, like adding network storage, I was wondering if there is a playlist feature natively provided by HA.
I did see the playlist implemented using Node Red and tried it but it proved to be way too complicated and I could not get it to work. The thread also went cold a year ago.
I tried Music Assistant beta and it works, but MA updates the music files metadata on it’s own. I asked in the discord channel if there was a way to stop that from happening and the dev responded “uninstall MA”.
I still find it hard to believe that with all the technical advancements made in HA, it still does not provide a way of creating a playlist. Wondering if this is on the devs radar?
I tried Music Assistant beta and it works, but MA updates the music files metadata on it’s own. I asked in the discord channel if there was a way to stop that from happening and the dev responded “uninstall MA”.
I’m not sure what you mean by "MA updates the music files metadata on it’s own" I’ve tested every MAv2 version since released and MAv2 has never modified my tracks, not once.
MAv2 heavily depends on proper meta-data tagging, but that’s it.
If you use Plex, MAv2 has a Plex provider that works pretty good (not perfect) at this point.
Yes, I noticed that MA depends on metadata. So, I had six tracks which were ripped from a cassette. They did not have an artist information or any other information. They are very old prayers which do not have any artist/album/album artist etc. I just manually edited the metadata to put in a random artist’s name.
Now I go to Music Assistant, Artists and I saw that there was information about this artist, his picture, date of birth, birth place, his entire biography. I did not put it in there, so where did it come from? I was surprised. To test, I added more music by known artists, and again, I found that under Artists, MA had added information about the artists, like ABBA, Adele etc. It is definitely pulling the information from some internet database.
I also read somewhere that MA will not update any existing ID3 tags if they have information, but if they are missing information, MA will add it.
It is possible that your files are very well organized so you did not see this, but MA definitely adds artist information. I am not sure what else it modifies but I do not want my files modified in any way. The same files work well with Plex and iTunes.
I am using MA in an automation for playing just the six files in a playlist and they are working fine. I was hoping to expand functionality but will hold off doing so.
Perhaps, you are seeing MA pulling information in (scraping the information from on-line sources) and presenting it in the UI? I guarantee you it’s not being added to your tracks. MA does NOT modify your tracks.
You can see this for yourself by looking at the metadata in your track you’re testing with
MA is showing information about 50+ artists from online sources. I did not put this information in anywhere. Plex, iTunes, VLC: no media player does that.
Thanks for confirming that MA does not modify track metadata. I will do some more testing. Don’t want my music data being sent on the internet to anywhere.
I have written several MP3 players for personal use and in every case I used either the mp3 ID tag or the file names as a starting point for retrieving Metadata from various public sources online. I do not use MA but I am familiar with many of the programs you mentioned. I am pretty certain that these programs too use any existing ID tags to identify the music, and yes even provide album, artist, track, and album information by using this tag to obtain this information from the internet. In every case I am familiar with, once this data is identified it is retrieved from the internet and stored locally for future use. The internal ID tags of the music are NOT modified. After a quick look at the github Readme for MA, it is clear that it too does this.
Thanks for your insight. Since you actually know the coding of mp3 players, it is much appreciated.
The media players that I mentioned, Plex and iTunes, they both have functionality to disable any metadata fetching from internet. MA does not. Unnecessary metadata will bloat up the database, make it inefficient so make it optional. I don’t need to see the birth history of every artist…
MA is showing information about 50+ artists from online sources. I did not put this information in anywhere. Plex, iTunes, VLC: no media player does that.
Ummmm they ALL do that. Well at least every single player/server I’ve ever used, and that spans decades.
I have never seen so much information about any artist in any media player, unless someone configures the player to pull it from the internet. It is optional.
