managing Christmas / holiday music

[pending]

This is admittedly OCD on my part, but while I consider Christmas music to be an essential part of the holiday season, during most of the year I'd like to exclude it from my library. Partly this is to make browsing and searching more convenient; partly it's to avoid Christmas songs getting played unintentionally, e.g. when they're included in an album of otherwise non-Christmas tunes.

The 2 workarounds I can think of are less than ideal:
1) deselecting the relevant Genres (repetitive and tedious)
2) removing all Christmas / holiday music from the library each January, then re-importing it in December (laborious and error-prone)

Wondering if anyone can recommend a better solution?

 

[Stephen Healy]

This is admittedly OCD on my part, but while I consider Christmas music to be an essential part of the holiday season, during most of the year I'd like to exclude it from my library. Partly this is to make browsing and searching more convenient; partly it's to avoid Christmas songs getting played unintentionally, e.g. when they're included in an album of otherwise non-Christmas tunes.

The 2 workarounds I can think of are less than ideal:
1) deselecting the relevant Genres (repetitive and tedious)
2) removing all Christmas / holiday music from the library each January, then re-importing it in December (laborious and error-prone)

Wondering if anyone can recommend a better solution?

Hmm, a tricky one. This is a good case for having a 'Hide Album' feature which has had a couple of votes:

Upvoty

feedback.innuos.com

That said, I can think of 3 possible alternatives.

1. Use a NAS
If you happen to have a NAS drive or are prepared to use a shared folder on a PC, you could just place the Christmas music in there and then use Sense to add that Shared Folder to be added to the library. Then once the season is over, just disconnect the Shared Folder and the music will be removed again.
2. Playback from USB
If you have all the music on a USB drive anyway, you could simply do the playback straight from there, playing individual folders of music. This means you do not need to import, and will it will not integrate into the overall library. USB playback was intended for quite temporary/short-term uses such as this.
3. Migrate the music to a streaming service
The Christmas music/songs could be made on a TIDAL or Qobuz playlist instead, and that Christmas music simply lives there rather than as files on your server. We do have a Hide Playlist function:

So, you could assemble all the Christmas music on to a playlist on a streaming service, then hide the playlist when you are finished with it for the season. Again, this does mean not making use of the local files at all anymore, and does assume you subscribe to a streaming service.


Hope one of these could work for you!

 

[pending]

Hmm, a tricky one. This is a good case for having a 'Hide Album' feature which has had a couple of votes:

Upvoty

feedback.innuos.com

That said, I can think of 3 possible alternatives.

1. Use a NAS
If you happen to have a NAS drive or are prepared to use a shared folder on a PC, you could just place the Christmas music in there and then use Sense to add that Shared Folder to be added to the library. Then once the season is over, just disconnect the Shared Folder and the music will be removed again.
2. Playback from USB
If you have all the music on a USB drive anyway, you could simply do the playback straight from there, playing individual folders of music. This means you do not need to import, and will it will not integrate into the overall library. USB playback was intended for quite temporary/short-term uses such as this.
3. Migrate the music to a streaming service
The Christmas music/songs could be made on a TIDAL or Qobuz playlist instead, and that Christmas music simply lives there rather than as files on your server. We do have a Hide Playlist function:
View attachment 490
So, you could assemble all the Christmas music on to a playlist on a streaming service, then hide the playlist when you are finished with it for the season. Again, this does mean not making use of the local files at all anymore, and does assume you subscribe to a streaming service.


Hope one of these could work for you!

Brilliant, thanks very much! Playback from USB is a great idea and will be easy to implement.

Also appreciate knowing about the Hide playlist feature -- I didn't realize this existed.