I have been working on extending the existing web plugin slightly to support views of Albums as well as Tracks. This is not intended to compete with the Aura client or with Beetle as it isn’t intended to be an environment for finding and playing music. It is primarily a web version of the “beet list” command, to make it easy to manage a large database and check what attributes are set.
Of course, you can search tracks, just as in the existing web plugin. Here is an example of searching for ‘#dvorak’ in the list of tracks. As before, the matching tracks are displayed on the left and if one is selected, the details are displayed on the right:
What is new is that you can also search albums. Here is an example of again searching for ‘#dvorak’ but this time as an album. This time, the matching albums are displayed on the left (in red to make it it easy to see they are albums not tracks). If an album is selected, the album info is displayed on the right, along with a link to see the list of tracks for the album.
If the track link is clicked, the list of tracks from the album are on the left and can be clicked on to see the track info.
I am thinking about proposing this as a replacement for the existing web plugin. Does anyone have any thoughts or comments?
There was an earlier proposal to provide album support a few years ago (Is it possible to edit the template of the web plugin?). Personally I prefer the idea of a smaller change keeping the interface simpler. Particularly for my use case which is mainly to provide other family members with a non-unix interface for finding whatever they are looking for on the server.