How to show never played albums in Clementine

Question

Is there some kind of filter or smart playlist that would allow me to show only albums that have never been played before or that have been played a specific amount of times?

The smart playlist "never played", it seems that picks random songs that have never been played, instead of full albums.

Any suggestions?

I use Clementine 1.2

Answer 1

This cannot be done with smart playlists (yet). Although you can create your own smart playlists, all criteria only match directly to a song from your database. Any comparison between found songs or grouping of matching songs is not possible. At most you can edit the smart playlist for "never played" to order songs by album (of course only the not yet played ones)

Looking at clementine's database at ~/.config/Clementine/clementine.db it seems, that clementine essentially manages all songs in an single table named 'songs' (so no extra tables for artist or album). But as it is a sqlite database it should be possible to write a little program that does the appropriate queries to find albums where no song has ever been played. Something like this:

select album, track, title, playcount, filename from songs 
  where album in (select distinct album from songs where playcount = 0) 
  and album not in (select distinct album from songs where playcount != 0) 
  order by album, track;

From this list a playlist could be generated. I'm not sure about directly inserting it back into the database, but exporting a .m3u or .pls should be possible.

A possible problem could be that several artists could have albums of the same same as well as there could be albums with several artists on them. So separating albums could be an issue.

Answer 2

Adaephon answers correctly that this is not properly possible in clementine at the moment, but there is a crude way around it if your music library is ordered something like Artist/Album/tracknr-title.mp3 on disk. In this case you can create a smart playlist that has Play count equals 0 in the search terms, and then on the next page Sort songs by File name A-Z (this includes path) and Limits to Show all the songs. Save the playlist, without dynamic mode, start it, and put your shuffle mode on Shuffle albums

Downside of this method: The matching is done on song level, which means that if you played a couple of songs on an album but not the full album, it will still show up in the list, but without the songs you already played.