How to Create Playlists

[tlcmd]

Assistance, please. I am a noobie to gmusicbrowser and am trying this player out for the first time.

Please approach your replies to me as if I essentially know nothing. I'm in the process of switching from Windows XP to Linux Mint Debian Edition and need a music player which will allow me to set up playlists (smartlists) by genre(s). I've been running JRivers Media Jukebox on Windows and need a comparable player on LMDE. gmusicbrowser seems to fit the bill.

My some 11k music files are indexed by genre (many by multiple genres) such as mood, jazz, female vocal, Christmas, etc.) as well as artist, song title, etc.

Unfortunately, most replies as well as the support info (wiki) assume that I have more knowledge than I do.
So my questions will really be quite basic, please put up with my lack of knowledge and use the KISS principle in your replies (Keep It Simple for Stupid).

My questions:
1) How do I set up a playlist using genre(s)?
2) How can I exclude genres (example: Christmas) from a playlist.

The answers to these two questions will get me started and i believe I can pick up most of the rest of the workings of gmusicbrowser with hands on experience and the use of the wiki.

Thanks,
tlcmd (aka Dick)

[Quentin Sculo]

1) you can create a filter using genres, there are many ways to do that, here's a few :
- you can select a few genres in the genres list, drag them to the "saved" tab and drop them on the "saved filters" line
- you can select a few genres and right click on the "saved filters" line and choose "saved current filter as", you will get a filter edition window
- type for example "genre:rock" in the search entry and then save the filter as above

Then you can select the filter in the filter menu (is your layout as a menu) or right click on it on the list and choose play.
You can also skip the "save filter" part and choose play when right clicking on the list of genres, or hit the play current filter button if you have one in your layout.

If you have trouble finding the genre list and the saved tab (it depends a lot on the layout you are using) see this small screenshot :

2) you can edit the filter you have saved : right click on it and choose edit, and add a genre condition, you have to click on the ying/yang icon (can very depending on the icon theme) to make the selected condition negative.
you can also do it in the search entry, for example :  "genre:rock genre:other -genre:christmas" will show songs that have genres "rock" or "other" but not "christmas"

Actually I've just noticed that if a song has more than one genre, the negative substring search will match if at least one genre doesn't contain the substring, it seems wrong, I'll have to look into that. Edit: fixed in git

[tlcmd]

Quentin,
Thanks for the concise and apparently complete answer to my questions regarding playlists. I'll give it a shot tomorrow. Since each of my songs usually as multiple genres (Christmas, mood, romance, female vocal, easy listening, torch for Julie London's "I'd Like You For Christmas" from my songs imported from JRivers Media Jukebox, I've ended up with a "gazillion" genre playlists. I assume I'll end up creating another set using the filters on gmusicbrowser.

Can I add a song, albumn, or another playlist to "playing now" without creating another *&^%$%^&* playlist?

Thanks,
tlcmd (aka Dick)

[Quentin Sculo]

Can I add a song, album, or another playlist to "playing now" without creating another *&^%$%^&* playlist?

Yes, there is a few ways to add songs to the current playlist :
- in the right-click menu of album/genre ... list there is a "Add to playlist" that will do that
- if you have a "playlist view" you can drag and drop songs/albums/... to it. You can have a "playlist view" in layouts that use a TabbedLists, if it's not already in one of the tabs, right click on the tabs and choose "Open playlist"

You may also be interested in the queue, songs in the queue will play next until the queue is empty, you can add songs to the queue from context menus, drag and drop to a "queue view", and a middle click in a "song menu" or double middle-click in a song list or album/... list