Dynamic Dashboard

Help
1

There’s a high chance that you’ve stumbled upon one of these before:

apple_music_06_1x

This is called a dashboard, a sort of home tab that music streaming services make use of a lot. Here you have shortcuts to your favorite artists, playlists, albums, etx. You get the idea.

What I’m trying to do

I’m using Obsidian to create my very own database. A place where you can play games, watch movies, listen to music, read books and many other things, directly from here. Luckily for me it has turned out pretty neat, it’s a system that “just works”, as Todd Howard would say :wink:
I’ve been a collector of diverse media all my life, and now I’ve finally found a piece of software that lets me enhance my experience.

Now, I have over 15k tracks on my database; all of them include complete metadata and related info, like personal playlists and record labels. As you can see, the content isn’t the problem, but rather how to properly make use of it. I’ve already managed to transform Obsidian into a sort of streaming device for everything, from a game launcher to a Netflix-like platform, but it’s still missing it’s core component: a music player.

Things I have tried

I’ve tried the Soundscapes plugin which is awesome, but my collection is big enough to make it worthless since I can’t exactly choose what I want to listen. Reminds me why I stopped using Mp3s years ago. I will keep on using it tho because it’s really impressive, a big thanks and kudos to Andrew McGivery for such a plugin, but sadly it’s not what I’m looking for atm. (I know this has nothing to do with dashboards, but it’s the closest thing to a music player I’ve found).

I’ve also tried with tables. I’m always creating all sorts of tables. Together with the Sheets Extended plugin I managed to give it a proper dashboard shape, but the content will always be the same unless I edit it; i.e. it’s not dynamic, and if it’s not dynamic then it’s pointless.

I would like to know if there’s a way to make it dynamic, to have new content every time I reload the page. (Also shoutout to the Refresh Preview plugin, cause it does exactly what it says and its extremely useful).

It’s not as easy as a random note picker unless I can define its folder parameters; since it’s a dashboard I’m linking notes into images, so whenever you click an album’s cover art it opens the album’s note. This means that — in case there’s something that lets me achieve this — the “random album” note should be displayed with its proper cover art.

PS: I’m not interested in Dataview at all, but if it solves my problem then I’m all in for it.

I hope this mess makes sense… thank you all in advance :slight_smile:

2

If you want a dynamic view of your media, and be able to do filtering based upon year, genre, artist, and what not, I reckon you need to go far beyond a simple static table. There are three different plugins I think of when I read your request:

  • Metadata menu - This plugin has the possibility to define FileClass’es which could correspond to the various media types you’ve got, and it has a table view where you rather easily could do active filtering. Not sure if it can produce the dashboard, but it should be somewhat easy to generate various lists based on your various criteria
  • DB Folder - This is a slightly older plugin, but it also provides a table view of data with extended filtering options
  • Dataview - Using Dataview you could create various queries to build various lists, and this would most likely be the one where it’s “easiest” to change into a dashboard. But then again, it might be slightly harder to enable the various filtering options.
    Dataview would be great to build a query to give you a given artist, or a query to give you that genre, but building one query to do both could depending on your wishes could be tricky.
    Although I’ve seen in the forums that thereis a script related to dynamic filtering of Dataview query, but I’ve never used that personally.

So I guess it kind of comes down to how dynamic do you want it to be, which parameters do you want to change to give you a different set of music. Or is it more of a semi-dynamic variant, where you would like to build various query to give you all the music by this artist, or in that genre, or similar “locked set of parameters” queries.

1 Like
3

Hey @holroy! Thank you for taking the time to answer, appreciate it.

I gave some of these plugins a look, specially to the DB Folders one. First of all; I don’t know if I made myself clear with this but I want it to look like the image attached above; yeah, I want it to auto update itself with new content every time I open my note, but it’s kinda pointless for me if it doesn’t look like an actual dashboard.

I thinks this fits more with what I’m looking for, and the reason why I wanted to use tables in first place:

ios13-iphone-xs-ipad-pro-apple-music-family-hero
ios13-iphone-xs-ipad-pro-apple-music-family-hero1280×810 247 KB

The iPad one look is quite exactly to what I want to achieve, and although I agree with you that tables might not be enough to do so, they’re the only method I can think of that lets me reach something that looks at least similar. Here’s a quick draft I made:

image
image1111×725 116 KB

See? You have the playlists, the artists, the albums, the genres, the comps… everything you need! It’s just missing the “dynamic” component that automatically updates itself. Previously I talked about how I require the randomness to not be too “fuzzy” because the image displayed should be linked with it’s note — not just any note; whenever I click on an image I expect to see it’s contents, i.e. to go to an album when I click on its cover.

  • On a little side note and in case anyone’s wondering, I use the following to transform images into wikilinks: image

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think most of the plugins you mentioned above can’t display content this way, right? At least not what I’ve found related to them. I know it’s tricky, but somehow and considering everything I’ve done and saw about Obsidian, it makes me feel it’s plausible.

So I guess it kind of comes down to how dynamic do you want it to be, which parameters do you want to change to give you a different set of music.

Just to pick them from a selected folder. Heck, I think that’s the quickest response I can deliver atm lol.

Now that I think about it, if there’s a plugin or some tool that lets me link images in order to open a selected note every time I click on it would make things extremely easier, because I’ll just have to think about something that let’s me pick an image depending on it’s parameters instead of having multiple links.

Def want to hear what you think about it. Hope others join the convo to share their thoughts too because this is getting pretty interesting if you ask me…

4

I think a lot of people would like this tiles-on-dashboard functionality: to see what’s available and have these tiles automatically update themselves over time.

I am personally not interested in such a setup, but from what I’ve seen around the forum (and this is the only experience I can share, without going down to the nitty-gritty), people use: Note Gallery, Image Gallery, Page Gallery plugins (there may be different names), but these will probably take the whole page on their own and will not be able to be embedded in a modular layout and their templating options may be too niche to learn (or too rudimentary).

So your best bet would be to use multi colums with your own CSS hacks, maybe along with some of the functionality of the Tabs plugin (one implementation is found here), and inside of these elements you would add your Dataview or DataviewJs queries, or with live filtering options you can try Datacore, featured also in the vault with the link above.

For inspiration and more interaction with how to put elements together I’d say you’d probably have more luck on a Discord channel or Reddit where people come off as more trigger-happy, or can start off on a demo vault like the one mentioned above and slowly work your way around it.