Custom Start Stop Times

With Custom Start Stop Times¹ you can start and stop tracks at a specific playback time or skip a specific part of the song (e.g. silence) by simply adding custom start, stop or skip times to a track's comments tag. With the help of this plugin, the song will start² or end, i.e. skip to the next one, when you want it to, or skip² an unwanted part. No more annoying song intros or minutes of silence.

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Screenshots³

Requirements

• LMS version >= 7.9
• LMS database = SQLite
  
  
  

Comment tag patterns

For this plugin to work, you need to add your custom start, stop or skip times to the comment tag of the tracks that you wish to start and stop at custom times or skip a specific part of. For a larger number of songs it probably makes sense to use a script (see macOS Music app example below).

Please use the simple patterns listed below. They are case-sensitive (use upper case) but it doesn't matter whether your time value has a comma, a decimal point or neither.

Start time

• The pattern is: STARTTIME:{time}STARTEND where {time} is your start time
• Example: STARTTIME:5,3462STARTEND will make your song start at 5.3462 seconds.

Stop time

• The pattern is: STOPTIME:{time}STOPEND where {time} is your stop time, i.e. when LMS skips to the next song.
• Example: STOPTIME:248,32STOPEND will make LMS skip to the next song after 248.32 seconds.
  
  

Skip part of the song

You will have to set a skip start point and a time to which the plugin should jump (skip stop point). You need to set both. And you cannot skip multiple parts, just one.

• The skip start point pattern is: SKIPSTART:{time}SKIPSTARTXXX where {time} is the time when LMS should skip to the skip stop point.

• The skip stop point pattern is: SKIPSTOP:{time}SKIPSTOPXXX where {time} is the time to which LMS should skip from the skip start point.

• Example: SKIPSTART:156SKIPSTARTXXX SKIPSTOP:337,2SKIPSTOPXXX will make LMS jump to the playback position 337.2 seconds in the song after 156 seconds.

💡 If you do a manual jump inside the currently playing song beyond the skip start point, skipping is disabled for the currently playing song.

Installation

Custom Start Stop Times is available from the LMS plugin library: LMS > Settings > Manage Plugins.

If you want to test a new patch that hasn't made it into a release version yet, you'll have to install the plugin manually.

Music app (macOS)

If you use the Music app on macOS, take a look at the simple Applescript included in this repository:

• it can gather songs for which you have set start or stop times in the Music app in a playlist and
• write those start and stop times to the comment tag of those tracks.

Works for me but use at your own risk :-)
If you want to run the script on a large number of tracks, consider exporting the script as an app.³

Reporting a new issue

If you want to report a new issue, please fill out this issue report template.

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Footnotes

1. If you want localized strings in your language, please read this. ↩

2. As the LMS source code states: a "jump to a particular time in the current song should be dead-on for CBR, approximate for VBR". ↩ ↩²

3. If you want the Music app to list your apps and Applescripts in the Scripts menu, you have to place them in ~/Library/Music/Scripts. ↩ ↩²