Navidrome Daily: Smart Playlists Get Album Awareness
A single merged change, PR #5899, adds five album-level fields to smart playlists so users can sort and filter by album, not just by individual track timestamps.
Duration: PT2M4S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Navidrome Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Navidrome Daily
- Published: 2026-08-07T10:01:04Z
- Audio duration: PT2M4S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning. It's August 7th, 2026, and this is Navidrome Daily.
Today's codebase activity centers on one focused but meaningful fix to smart playlists, closing a gap that's been an open discussion in the community.
The problem: smart playlists could sort by when a track was added, but every track has its own timestamp. So sorting by "newest first" would scatter an album's songs instead of keeping them together in order. There was no clean way to build a "recently added albums" playlist that actually played like an album.
PR #5899, from Deluan, fixes this by adding five new album-level fields: album date added, album date modified, album duration, album song count, and album size. These pull from the album table directly, which meant giving them their own join in the query builder rather than reusing the existing album annotation…
One notable design decision, called out directly in the commit: an "album release date" field was considered and rejected. Because the underlying album release date is only set when all tracks agree, it would often just be blank and wouldn't reliably represent the album. Worth remembering if that idea resurfaces later.
The naming also got a small…
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