web: queue songs to play

[Bitdemon]

It would be nice if you were able to queue songs on the webpage if one is currently playing. Probably a bigger change since a small database would be needed but with it beets could be used easily by guests or on small networks.

[sampsyo]

Cool; seems like a good idea to me.

FWIW, the long-term plan for the web plugin is to define a common API for web-based players, so it should be possible to write fancier (and just plain more functional) players that interoperate with other backends. Pie in the sky!

[PierreRust]

I'm currently thinking to that kind of functionality as well, and here what I currently think

• for a single client, the play queue state can be maintained client-side (easy enough to to in a browser, even easier in a desktop or mobile app) : so if your client (browser) is playing the music (with flash or html5) it does not really make sense to keep the play queue on the server (i.e. beets ) side
• on the other hand, if the server (beets or a beets-controlled player, like mpd) is playing the music, then it's usefull to be able to access and modify the queue from several clients. In that case it is necessary to maintain the queue server-side but I don't think it should be the responsibility of the beets core nor web plugin.

So my conclusion would be :

• a player - interface plugin (a plugin controlling an mpd server for example) should maintain the play queue
• the web plugin should expose this queue management in the Web API
• to make this modular, it would be even better if we had a generic mechanism to allow a plugin to 'enrich' the Web API

I'm definitely willing to participate to the long-term plan for the web plugin :)