Allow tagging of albums

[TimothyWalschaerts]

Prefacing with my general first impression I wrote elsewhere earlier:

it works great! I think the execution of the tagging itself maybe has a bit of an edge over the filtering "overview", but that's also because of my use case.

I noticed that it lets you use all this tagging functionality for tracks and have tried it out for a bit now. Is there a possibility it will ever be able to do the same for albums? I guess as a user you could use the first track of an album to represent the entire album, but was wondering if actually adding it for albums was something you'd consider.

[alexk218]

Thanks Timothy!
So to clarify: you'd like the ability to tag an album. Which means we'd perhaps have a separate "tagged" section specifically for albums, where we can view all of our tagged albums? What else would you like to see here? The ability to create playlists based on tagged albums?
I'd like to know what you'd use this for exactly, so I can figure out how this would be implemented.

[TimothyWalschaerts]

Hey, to provide some context:
I think the song tagging system works really well for playlist-based listening, which is what Spotify mainly focuses on. But I'm sure there's demand for better album management among users as well. Without tools, Spotify offers very limited options for sorting or filtering albums. It’s easy to end up with a large collection of favorited albums but still struggle to find the right vibe unless you manually scroll through the entire list.

Because of that, I (and I think most users) end up using playlists to categorize albums, but playlists aren’t really ideal for managing albums. The tagging system you’ve already built for songs (with ratings, tags, and playlist creation) would work just as well for albums. So that would be the main thing I'd like to see, simply the exact same system but for albums.

Looking at the local JSON structure, you already use an array "categories" for tags and "tracks" for songs, so at a glance it should be the easiest to simply add an "album" array in terms of managing the data. I imagine the main implementation challenge would be how to adapt to the front-end/UI which differs a bit between albums and songs, since songs can be displayed in columns (one of which is the Tagify column), but albums don't have this visual.

[alexk218]

I see how that can be useful. You're right about the UI being a challenge here - I'll have to make a few mockups and think about how I can organize all of this. I like the idea and it's one of the next features I'll be working on. Stay tuned!

[pillylavocado]

Are you familiar with the Rate Your Music website? It allows you to rate any type of media (music but also movies) and you can also rate albums. Right now it's the best way for me to catalog the music I listen to but sometimes it can be a little annoying because I don't think you can't directly connect your Spotify account to your RYM account. If you could add the ability to rate whole albums and not just single tracks it would be awesome since it would be so much quicker for me and also other users i think.

[TimothyWalschaerts]

I actually came across Tagify while checking if Rate Your Music had Spotify integration. Since it doesn't, I started looking for an alternative. I’ve recreated many of the RYM tags in Tagify, along with some custom ones, and now use it to organize albums. I find that having a built-in tagging system within the app I actually use to listen to music is more convenient than managing everything through a separate site, though RYM is still great for discovering new albums.

[ramirodeca]

How do you use it to organize albums? So far I can only tag songs with it.

[TimothyWalschaerts]

I simply tag the first song to represent the album. I don't tag any song "on its own" because Tagify's features are exactly what I want for albums. For the most part I'm fine with simple Spotify playlists to organize songs, I have a whole (mostly) public genre-based collection set up. For other types of sorting like more mood-based, I have private ones.

[ramirodeca]

I just discovered tagify and from my short time testing it out, I have to say I'm impressed with the functionality! Great work.

I am also someone who primarily listens to albums; I have hundreds saved on my library and it's become very difficult to navigate through them. I agree that RYM is the closest alternative that we have to tag and organize our music collections and while it's a great website, it doesn't fully integrate with the Spotify client like many would want.

I look forward to seeing album tags implemented, and if I may make another suggestion, I would love to see automatic genre and year tagging and grouping through something like the MusicBrainz API. That by itself would probably solve most of the issues we face when trying to browse through our libaries.

[alexk218]

Happy to see you're enjoying Tagify!
Album tagging is a very high priority.
Your other suggestions are interesting too - will look into this!
Thank you for the support