How to make Noise play what I want?

Question

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but I don't really get the logic of Noise player (or these music-library based players in general, I use Audacious on my other systems). However I want to give it a chance before I switch so please don't recommend other players (unless they follow elementary design guidelines but work like Audacious).

Update: After switching to elementary OS Juno on my primary laptop (a Dell ultrabook), I've found that Music/Noise actually cannot even load my library (~30 GB of mp3s) - it crashed every time I tried to import it. Then I tried Melody - a great player by Artem Anufrij, which loaded the library in two minutes. This player works exactly how I expect it, I highly recommend it and if I knew about it before, I wouldn't even bother to aks this question here.

When I double-click on an album (for example) I expect it to play just that album but it won't - it plays from the whole collection of my music, which is incredibly annoying. Shuffle in particular is very problematic in this regard, with shuffle off it plays the album before it switches to some other music.

Also the queue feature works rather unpredictable - I managed to put some songs there once but when I tried to add more songs it didn't update and showed no other songs than the first batch. Also most of the time the queue shows up as empty even though there is music playing, which is superpuzzling to me.

So to narrow it down:

1. How do I make Noise to play only subset of my library, e.g. few albums or just hand-picked songs?
2. How do I use queue properly?

Answer 1

If you select an artist or album in the column view, and start playing music from there, playback does remain confined to the list you see in the view. Unfortunately, it looks like confining playback to an arbitrary playlist just isn't an option at the moment: https://bugs.launchpad.net/noise/+bug/1507047

Regarding the queue, I tried it and thought it worked as expected. I didn't see the issue you talked about (I managed to put some songs there once but when I tried to add more songs it didn't update and showed no other songs than the first batch) I think when you look at the empty queue, the information displayed there does a good job explaining how it works.

Answer 2

I know this is an old question, but I thought I'd answer in case someone found it useful.

For just one album, the first option is always the "View in columns" mode. Select the album from the third top column and it'll stay confined to your choice. Same thing with artists/genres.

The second one is as simple as using the searchbar. In any view, just type the name of the album and the list automatically narrows down to the songs in that album; same thing with artists/genres.

In case you want various albums or handpicked songs, it's not that complicated either (maybe a little bit tedious, though). Works this way:

• Make a new playlist ("+" Button on the bottom left corner > "Add Playlist".)
• Use the searchbar to find the album, and while on "View as list", drag and drop the songs of your choice to your playlist on the sidebar.
• Repeat the last step to add any other. If you want the whole album, drag it and drop it to the playlist from the "View as albums" view.

I honestly don't have any complains about Noise in this regard, though I believe they could improve queue; that one is still kind of nonsense.