Google Home use case : automatically create as many playlists as available artists/genres/albums

[sheepdestroyer]

Hi, I hoped to use this extension to sidestep google's restrictions on Google Home.

It is not possible to request specific artist or album from our own library on Google Home. That feature is only available with a paying Google Play Music account.

In order to listen to our own uploaded music, it is only possible to ask for an existing playlist.

It would then be great to have a way to automatically create as many playlists as available Artists / Genres / and Albums.

Would that use case be possible to support?

[simon-weber]

Autoplaylists (at least in its current state) probably isn't what you're looking for: creating new autoplaylists is a manual process, so it'd be about the same as if you made the playlists manually. The load from keeping that many playlists up to date for a typical library would probably also cause issues.

A gmusicapi script sounds like a better fit if you're willing to write some code. If you go that route feel free to drop me a line and I'll add it to the readme so other people can find it.

[Dasonk]

I should probably put this as a separate issue but I think an idea for a new feature I've been pondering might help with this. I've been thinking it might be nice to have a way to build a template for playlists that can take inputs and create different playlists off of that.

For example maybe I want a different playlist for my top 25 most played songs filtered by genre. The idea being that maybe the template allows you to specify something like "genre EQUALS *", sort by play count descending, limit to 25. Then once you submit that you get a different page where you get to choose (maybe via checkboxes or something) which values to apply that template to. So you could have it select all unique genres or maybe you only want a subset so you choose those.

Obviously the details need to be worked out but it certainly seems like something that could be possible and save a bit of work for people that want specific playlists that all follow a certain pattern.

If this was implemented it might make it easy to get at what @sheepdestroyer is asking for. I hadn't seen your gmusicapi repo before but that looks awesome but if somebody updates their library often enough it might make more sense to have these playlists as autoplaylists so they get updated as well.

[simon-weber]

Ah, yeah, some kind of templating would work nicely here. I've certainly got playlists I'd switch over to something like that (eg "top X" for a few genres X). I think I've seen someone request this on the mailing list before, too.

The added load is something we'd have to be careful of, though: by my numbers nobody's ever tried to run more than a few dozen autoplaylists at once. At least for the Home use case, it sounds like we'd need more like hundreds or thousands.

[Dasonk]

On a side note my wife literally got me a google home mini for my birthday yesterday so I think I'll work try to find a good way using your gmusicapi to do the original ask and @sheepdestroyer I'll ping you if/when that happens.

[simon-weber]

Haha, excellent timing! And happy birthday! 🎉

[sheepdestroyer]

Nice :)

I was contemplating learning python / re-learning coding, but was already stalled on which text editor/IDE to use... Any recommendation (fedora) ?

I guess I would start by cloning https://github.com/christopher-dG/gpymusic and going at it like a Mort when i'd find free time. I'll still try it but please do ping here if you arrive at something before me (that, I don't doubt) :)

[Dasonk]

Side note: I've noticed that when streaming from my google home the stats on my songs don't get updated. This seems to be a google issue and not something autoplaylists can fix but it's partially why I lost interest in this issue. I might still get back to it one day especially if Google fixes this particular issue.

[simon-weber]

Huh, interesting. Good to know.