Browsing and discovery

Browsing and discovery

Documentation home

Source/test builds also include playlist duration and image controls, ahead of the next desktop release.

Tagcast starts on Album artists. Choose an artist to see their albums, or use Albums to browse the whole collection. Search, filter, sort, and switch between covers and a compact list. Choose 24, 50, 100 or 200 items per page; Tracks and Favourites offer 50, 100 or 200.

Page	What you can do
Album artists	Search artists, see their photos and album counts, or filter those without an image. Sort by name or choose Random for a shuffled list; its order stays the same while searching, paging and going Back. Choose a name sort and then Random again to reshuffle. Open an artist's albums and select several of their albums to edit together.
Track artists / Composers	Find albums featuring a performer or composer, with album and track counts. Stored iBroadcast artist IDs determine membership.
Genres	Browse main and additional genres. Click a genre on an album to open the same group. Combined labels such as Pop;Rock stay as stored until you choose to split them in the editor or reviewed cleanup.
Tags	Browse custom iBroadcast labels, including empty tags. Manage assignments on albums or individual tracks, or create, rename and delete labels after review.
Release year	Browse albums by track year, falling back to album year. Tracks without either appear under Unknown year.
Decades	Choose a period such as 1980s for a random selection of albums. Surprise me again gives you another selection; use the page-size control to choose how many to show.
Tracks	Search every track by title, artist, album or composer. Case and accents do not matter: bjork finds Björk. Searches return at most 1,000 results. Open a result's album or play from that track.

Track artist, composer, genre and year cards open matching albums, rather than a separate track list. One matching active track is enough to include an album. Multi-disc sets stay together and count as one album in these cards. Decades use the same year fallback and omit tracks with unknown years.

Album filters help you find missing years, genres, covers or composers; combined genres; artists without an image; albums with only 1–2 tracks; gaps in track numbering; repeated track numbers; and named editions. Next album lets you work through a filtered collection.

Browser Back and Forward restore the page you came from, including its search, filters and page. Back also preserves a decade's random selection. Collection and artist totals emphasize albums, with track counts below, using existing summaries. On a narrow screen, the hamburger menu keeps navigation, connection controls and source settings accessible.

In Settings → Sidebar → Choose shortcuts and order, hide optional shortcuts or move items up and down. These changes apply immediately and are remembered in this browser. Album artists, Albums, Change history, Settings and connection controls remain available. Restore default sidebar resets the layout. Hiding a shortcut does not disable its feature; Recently played and 1001 Albums still require their separate opt-in settings.

The Theme button opens one menu with Appearance (Auto, Light or Dark) and Colour: Forest (the original green), Ocean, Warm and iBroadcast inspired. Colour and light/dark appearance are independent and remembered in this browser. The palette also applies to the sidebar, player and fullscreen Now playing. Switching colours keeps playback running and makes no library requests.

The sidebar header shows Tagcast., with a dot in the palette's accent colour. Metadata editor & player sits directly below the name, alongside the icon. The version appears in one muted colour beside Settings in the footer, with a compact original Powered by iBroadcast logo on the right. The account status uses regular text weight. Reload library and Disconnect share a row. Album artists uses a microphone, Genres a label and Tags a hash icon. One Favourites shortcut opens Tracks, Albums and Album artists tabs.

The cassette-in-sleeve sidebar icon follows the chosen colour palette. The standalone app icon uses the primary blue and cream design.

Album pages

Album pages keep the cover aligned with the title and group genres and tags in one compact row. Click the release year to browse that year in your collection. + Tag opens tag management; partial and archived assignments remain visible. Unset hearts/stars stay neutral, and Clear appears only when rated. Use ⋯ → Move to trash… for the existing track selection and review. The clickable breadcrumb follows where you opened the album, such as Workspace / Tags / Emusic / album. Return to that context with its filters, order, page and scroll position; direct album links fall back to Albums.

Compact album tracklists

Ordinary tracks stay on one line. Extra performer or composer credits, tags and format differences appear only when present. The album artist is not repeated. On mobile, the cover fills the available width above the title and details.

Enlarging covers

Open an album, then double-click its cover to open a lightbox, or focus the cover button and press Enter. Close with Escape, the ×, or a click outside the image view. Covers in grids and lists open their album immediately. The compact player's cover opens Now playing immediately.

Album cards and list rows have a small Play button beside the compact + menu. Play starts the complete album/set and replaces the queue without opening another page. The + menu keeps its queue actions. Play random album remains available in All albums and discovery groups; cleanup filters and manual album selections hide it.

The viewer contains the full image without cropping. Larger iBroadcast artwork loads only when you open it; if unavailable, Tagcast falls back to the existing cover. Playback, the queue and browser history stay unchanged.

Random album playback

Play random album is available on Albums, an album artist’s collection, and the album lists within Genres, Release year, Decades, Track artists and Composers.

The button respects the current artist, search and filters and chooses from all matching albums across every page. Within a decade it uses the whole matching decade, not just the displayed random sample. It plays the complete album in track and disc order and replaces the queue. Disc sets have one chance each. When there is another choice, the currently playing album is skipped. Plays follow your optional play-reporting setting; starting a random album does not change metadata.

Cleanup/edition filters and active album selections hide random playback.

Combined browse menus

Album artists and Albums each have one Filter and sort menu instead of separate dropdowns. The button shows the current filter and sorting order. Inside, Sort and Show are independent choices, each with a checkmark: changing the order keeps the filter, and changing the filter keeps the order. Search, page-size and grid/list controls remain separate.

Show filters with no matching artists/albums are omitted. Counts reuse the loaded artist groups or merged albums within the current album artist, before text search; opening the menu does not download tracks. All album artists / All albums always remains available. If a previously selected filter becomes empty after a library change, it stays active until you choose another filter.

The former album sorts Most tracks without genre, Track count · fewest first and Track count · most first have been removed. Use Show for metadata and track-count filters. Old history states for these sorts fall back to album artist order. Other sort choices, including rating and Date uploaded, remain available.

Use a mouse/touch, or open with Enter/Space or an arrow key. Up/Down and Home/End move through the menu; Enter/Space chooses an option. Escape, the close button or an outside click dismisses it. A long menu scrolls on mobile. Choosing an option returns focus to the button; opening or closing never changes playback or adds a browser history entry. Back restores the filter and sort together.

Optional artist biographies

1. Open Settings → Artist biographies.
2. Enable Show artist biographies from TheAudioDB, then save Settings.
3. Open an album artist. If a matching English text is available, expand About this artist to read it and follow the source link.

This option is off by default. Enabling it alone does not scan the library or fetch biographies. Visiting an artist reads the local cache first; missing or outdated text is fetched in the background while the albums remain usable. Only that artist's name is sent to TheAudioDB. No account credentials or track lists are sent, and no iBroadcast metadata is changed.

Public English text is held separately in artist-biographies.sqlite3 in the Tagcast settings folder. Available texts are reused for 30 days before checking again; missing or ambiguous matches are remembered for one day. Existing cached text stays available during a refresh. The cache is limited to 5,000 records and 20 MiB of stored content, plus SQLite overhead. Turning the feature off stops future lookups and keeps the existing cache.

After a temporary provider failure, Try again at … shows when another attempt is available. The button becomes usable at that time without fetching automatically; click it to retry. Cached text stays visible and the biography stays open during the retry. Artists without a stored name are not looked up using the Unknown artist display placeholder; the page explains that a name is needed.

Exact artist names are matched; ambiguous results are left unresolved. A same-name result can still describe a different artist, so check the attribution link. Text may be missing or outdated. The feature uses TheAudioDB's free API; there is no bundled Premium key or Last.fm sign-in. Additional languages remain outside this update.

Optional album information

1. Open Settings → Album information.
2. Enable Show album information from TheAudioDB, then save Settings.
3. Open an album and expand About this album · TheAudioDB to read the available English background text and follow its source link.

This option is off by default and independent of artist biographies and 1001 Albums. Enabling it does not scan your collection or fetch any text by itself. Visiting an album first checks the local cache; only missing or expired information is fetched in the background. Only the stored primary album artist and full album title are sent to TheAudioDB, without credentials or track lists. Album controls and playback stay available while text loads or if a lookup fails.

One exact artist/title match is required, allowing differences in case and spacing while preserving accents, punctuation, numbered volumes and edition/version text. Uncertain matches are left unresolved; some albums have no English description. Check the source link, since names alone cannot prove the identity of a release. 1001 Albums texts take priority even when Settings → Discovery → 1001 Albums is off. The setting controls the discovery page/shortcut, not album background texts. Opening an album checks only its own identity against the local reference; a unique exact artist/title match or an active manual link can supply its text without any previous analysis. It does not scan the library, change counts or read/write the full analysis report. Tagcast shows only that local text, retaining its Wikipedia attribution and license links. It does not read or request TheAudioDB text for that album. Tagcast waits for the local identity/text check before choosing a source; it never starts a 1001 Albums analysis automatically. Albums without an available unambiguous reference text can still use TheAudioDB.

If the album exists on TheAudioDB but has no English description, Tagcast now explains that the album was found and provides its source link. This is distinct from a missing match. For example, Mambo! by Yma Sumac is found with the exclamation mark, but the API currently has no English background text for it.

Public text is stored in album-information.sqlite3 in Tagcast's settings folder. Available text is reused for 30 days before checking again when the album is revisited. Missing or ambiguous results are remembered for one day. The cache holds at most 5,000 records / 20 MiB of content, plus SQLite overhead. Turning the option off stops lookups and retains the cache. A multi-disc album makes one lookup for its displayed identity.

Cached text stays visible while refreshing. After a provider failure, Try again at … shows when a manual retry becomes available; Tagcast does not retry by itself. Expanding the text adds no history entry, and Back preserves the panel's open/closed state within the current page session. Nothing is written to iBroadcast. This uses the free API and does not add a Premium key.

Appearance refinements

• A speaker cabinet icon opens Sound, distinguishing it from the native player's volume icon. The native player panel follows the palette where the browser supports it, while keeping its standard controls.
• The playing track has a quiet background and a left accent stripe, rounded on the left and straight on the right. The # heading aligns with the centre of the number/play/speaker control, including double-digit track numbers.
• Breadcrumbs use consistent spacing around every /.
• Artist hearts use the shared SVG design. Artist biographies and About this album use a wider, limited reading measure instead of filling the full page.

See artist profile implementation notes for local storage, API validation and testing details.

Clear search fields

Search fields show an × button at their right edge while text is entered. This includes Albums, Album artists, browse groups, all three Favourites views, Tracks, Recently played, Playlists, 1001 Albums and the search fields in dialogs (tags, Cleanup, manual album links, CSV track matching, playlist destinations and folders, and online source searches).

Choose Clear search, or Tab to it and press Enter or Space. It clears only that search text and returns focus to the field. Live searches show the first results page again; the current filters, sort order and page size stay selected. Where a dialog has an explicit Search or Find button, clearing only edits the query: press Search/Find to refresh those results. Existing choices and drafts stay intact. Metadata editing fields are separate from these search queries.

The button disappears when the field is empty or unavailable and follows restored Back/Forward search state. Playback and the queue stay intact. Clearing makes no metadata writes; live searches reuse their usual local filtering or bounded search request. Available in Tagcast 0.70.2.