Is it possible to store playlists in music file metadata?

Question

I have been trying to think of a way to store my playlists completely independently from any one music player, and I think that one way to do this would be to use each song's tags to store the list of playlists in which that song belongs. For example, if song1.mp3 and song2.flac both belong in the "Cool Songs" playlist, then I would add to each of them a tag called "Playlist" with a value of "Cool Songs".

To access the "Cool Songs" playlist in my music player, I simply search for songs where the "Playlist" tag has a value of "Cool Songs". Obviously, I would need a music player that allows me to manipulate arbitrary tags on any music format, including multiple instances of the same tag (so that songs can be in multiple playlists). Instead of creating playlists, I create "saved searches" or whatever the music player calls them, that search for the appropriate playlist tag.

Is this scheme possible, and how many music player programs would support such a scheme?

Answer 1

I just realized the answer. I can store playlist info in the song tags as I descibe in the question, and then I can write a script to read the tags and create regular playlist files, which can be read by any music player.

New! An actual implementation!

I've implemented my mad scheme. You can find the results on github: https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/mkplaylist

Answer 2

I've not heard of any player that supports this, although it is feasible with certain containers (e.g. Ogg allows any number of instances of the same tag).

Answer 3

It depends on the file format used by the music. Some formats support a wide range of tags, some don't.

One of the disadvantages is that the speed may not be all that good - the player would need to open every file, and read it to locate the tag. Depending on how and where the tag is encoded this may be a slow operation. (I've implemented something like this in a music player where I wrote the firmware - all it did was read the song name, and that was slow enough. This was on an embedded system with no horsepower, though.)