Media player that uses tagged audio files to create playlists

[Deozaan]

Okay, so the subject seems to describe just about any media player out there already, but I couldn't think of how else to describe it.

I've had an idea recently that I think would be incredible for media players. It may already exist, or it may not be possible to do; I don't know about the inner workings of how data is stored in audio files. Anyway, the tagging I'm talking about is different than, say ID3v2 tags for MP3s. The kind of tagging I'm talking about is more like the kind of tagging people do on the internet. Short tags that describe and categorize the music based on personal associations (emotion, feeling, genre, instruments, events, whatever).

For instance, a techno song might have the tags "energetic, techno, happy, graduation, Sarah" or whatever you personally associate with that song.

What I think would be great is if there was a media player that allowed you to tag songs in this manner, that could also create playlists on the fly from your tags. You could select the "instrumental, depressing, new age, techno" tags and it would create a playlist of all songs that had at least one of those tags. Or perhaps you could customize it even further and require that the song must have x number of those n tags to be included in the playlist.

Is there anything out there that already does this? If not, is this something that would be feasible to implement with current audio formats?

[mouser]

this is something that would be nice to have incorporated into Random Mixtape Maker.

[Lashiec]

That sounds like "mood" tags and autoplaylists, respectively. I call them "mood" because it's the de-facto standard for naming them, but nothing stops you from storing whatever you want there. So, yeah, it already exists, and you can tag audio files with such data as long as the player/tagger you're using allows freeform tagging, although I guess you can always input them in the "comment" tag for those which don't allow it.

As for the second question, autoplaylists can easily achieve this. I ignore how the implementation of these go in iTunes or Winamp (the two I know have such function), but in foobar you can easily create an autoplaylist based in whatever search you want. What you can't do is to save the autoplaylist automatically to an external file, although I think there's a component that allows that.

[nosh]

Yep, Foobar is completely flexible with stuff like that. It's only a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into tagging your music once you have the player & components set up right. Applying genre + tempo + rating tags & making autoplaylists based on these three seems to do the trick for me.