Dynalist for music management

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#1

The Dynalist ecosystem has developed enough now to be an all-purpose hub for many things.

Like many, my music listening has gradually moved to streaming services. Apps like Spotify are wonderful in providing access to the world’s music, but strangely dire when it comes to user engagement. Unlike the previous generation of media managers, like Media Monkey, it doesn’t allow tagging or any management of saved albums. This is a particular problem for streaming music, as we don’t have the visual cues of CD covers in our space to remind us of a current playlist.

I’ve taken now to importing Spotify album links into Dynalist and tagging with a similar system I used in Media Monkey, related to situations. I have a generic tag #turntable for my current playlist. I then used the wonderful QuickDynalist by @Louis_Kirsch to save a search filter for these tags so I can more easily select what I want to listen to.

What I haven’t resolved yet is rating. It’s possible to use something like #f1-#f5, but that doesn’t offer a strong visual cue.

I’d be curious if others have found ways of extending Dynalist into their lives.

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#2

I’m tracking my TV series in Dynalist and o have the link to IMDb to every show

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#3

could you do something with emoji? :star::star::star:
use some software to make it quicker to paste in the stars (alt+5 to add 5 stars etc) and you could use the same when you want to search as well?

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#4

Yes, I do that now. I’m using TextExpander, but it has limited success when you want to paste over more than one line in Dynalist, so I am looking for alternatives.

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#5

I have no idea if this is helpful to you, but if you are a Pro user you could re-appropriate color labels and then use custom CSS to add stars instead of a colored background:

.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-1 .Node-renderedContent:before {
	content: "⭐️ ";
}

.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-2 .Node-renderedContent:before {
	content: "⭐️⭐️ ";
}

.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-3 .Node-renderedContent:before {
	content: "⭐️⭐️⭐️ ";
}

.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-4 .Node-renderedContent:before {
	content: "⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ";
}

.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-5 .Node-renderedContent:before {
	content: "⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ";
}

.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-1,
.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-2,
.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-3,
.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-4,
.Node-contentContainer.mod-color-label-5 {
	/* Remove background coloring, if you like */
	background: none;
}

This will remove the actual coloring and add 1-5 stars to the front of the item.

I only did a quick test with this, so I’m not sure how robust it is. Custom CSS also applies to all your documents (unless there’s a trick I haven’t learned yet) which might be a bit annoying if you use color labels for other purposes.

Take care,

_Lasar

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#6

That’s so clever. Unfortunately, I don’t want stars to replace colours throughout the rest of my database. I presume there’s a way to use tags to achieve the same thing?

1 Like
#7

I’m procrastinating and so had time to figure out a tag-based solution.

The following CSS basically just changes the formatting of the tags #f1-#f5.

a[title^="Filter #f1"],
a[title^="Filter #f2"],
a[title^="Filter #f3"],
a[title^="Filter #f4"],
a[title^="Filter #f5"] {
	float: left;
	font-size: 0;
	display: inline-block;
	margin-right: 10px;
	white-space: nowrap;
	text-decoration: none;
	background: none !important;
}

a[title^="Filter #f1"]:before,
a[title^="Filter #f2"]:before,
a[title^="Filter #f3"]:before,
a[title^="Filter #f4"]:before,
a[title^="Filter #f5"]:before {
	font-size: 16px;
}

a[title^="Filter #f1"]:before { content: "⭐️"; }
a[title^="Filter #f2"]:before { content: "⭐️⭐️"; }
a[title^="Filter #f3"]:before { content: "⭐️⭐️⭐️"; }
a[title^="Filter #f4"]:before { content: "⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️"; }
a[title^="Filter #f5"]:before { content: "⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️"; }

Here’s a little example document: https://dynalist.io/d/PNj-zzFnb2f5ZxbnF7kRbmPT

The tag can be anywhere in the item, it does not have to be at the front. The stars will always be put at the beginning of the item.

Also, like all markdown formatting, this formatting only takes effect when the item is not being edited. When editing, the tag will just appear as always.

Multiline items may look a bit wonky, not sure if that may be an issue for you.
I also haven’t tested it extensively, it may not look good on all platforms.

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#8

I now realize that obviously the example document won’t have my custom CSS applied. Tuesdays…

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of how the tagged items look:

Screenshot 2020-05-19 at 12.44.15

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#9

For some reason, the styling in your document didn’t work for me. But I incorporated it into my Dynalist and it works fine. Thank you. I hope it is useful to others.

Just one minor thing. It might be better to also make the original tag invisible with something like this:

a[title^=“Filter #f5”] {
visibility: hidden;
position: relative;
}

#10

I wanted to do that, but visibility:hidden will also hide the :before content, i.e. the stars. And it seemed good enough to not warrant any more fiddling (for me).