Share playlists between user accounts

[paulijar]

Add a possibility to have a playlist shared between user accounts. The minimal viable feature would be to only have this working on tracks which are already visible to both participants (e.g. in a shared folder which belongs to the music library path of both participants).

Further development could include:

• sharing with groups
• giving also the access to the contained tracks by sharing the playlist (i.e. no need to share the files/folders separately through Files app)

Originally suggested by @felixeriksson in #813 (comment)

[felixeriksson]

Hi! Thanks for formulating a separate issue for this, I appreciate it.

I have a loose idea on a possibly simple implementation - but I'm not familiar with the code base so I'm not sure how viable it is.

I've seen that it's possible to import/export playlists from/to file, by pressing ... next to a playlist's name. My idea is that an in-app playlist could be made to "sync" with a certain playlist file, and that this file would be placed in a folder accessible by the people with which the playlist is to be shared. Then other users could also "sync" a playlist to this file, effectively creating a shared playlist.

It could work something like this:

1. User Jane creates a playlist. Jane clicks ... next to the playlist, and chooses "Create synced file from playlist" or similar. Jane chooses to place this file in a folder which user John also has access to.
2. The music app creates a playlist file with the contents of Jane's playlist. Every time Jane edits the playlist, the synced file is first read (so that Jane's in-app playlist is up-to-date with the file before changing the file, if another user has edited it), and then updated with Jane's changes.
3. The synced file is also read every time the music app is started.
4. User John clicks "Import playlist from synced file". Now, he can also see and edit the playlist. When editing the playlist, his changes are saved to the file in the same way as described in 2.

What do you think of this idea? @paulijar

[paulijar]

@felixeriksson
Well, that would certainly be possible. But I'm not quite convinced that syncing via files would be so much easier to implement that it would be worth it. Especially considering the extra difficulty for the end user. If this feature is brought to the Music app UI, then I would like to have it as simple to use as possible:

1. Jane clicks ... next to a playlist and selects "Share..."
2. The details pane opens to enter the details for sharing.
3. Jane enters user name "John" as the share recipient and presses ok/proceed button.
4. The playlist becomes visible in John's library the next time it is loaded.

I feel, that the sharing playlists via files would be significantly lighter alternative than doing it "properly" only if it would be sufficient to do it without any UI changes. E.g. there would be an occ command which would sync a playlist with a file. The user could then set up a cron job to run this regularly.

Regardless of the design and implementation details selected, allowing the share recipient to modify the list will be a challenge. This will inevitably lead to situations where need to do some conflict resolution. In that sense, read-only shares would be much easier.

[paulijar]

Playlist syncing with a file has been proposed also in #832.

[ghost]

+1 I would also want to see this feature.

[ghost]

To add to the discussion above: I don't see it as a necessary requirement to be able to jointly edit playlists. Jane can make a playlist and share a read-only version with John (given he has access to those files).

I'm thinking of Spotify where most playlists are read-only to the listener and it works well. If John wishes to edit it, he can make a copy of it (future development I guess).

I'd also vote for something that is simple to use in the UI. I saw the workaround using file sync here: #832

And perhaps this would work as well for read-only sharing of playlists: #948