VLC 3.0, there’s a Playlist view that can show the title, album, etc.

But the Composer field is not supported. That’s a big deal for me. I track composers for ~1,200 Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu songs in that field. I really need to see and sort and filter by composer.

(“Really need” like I “really need a cheesecake”, not like “really need a charger”.)

Software’s so easy to change, so I asked ChatGPT:

Fork and clone sanand0/vlc, check out 3.0.24 and add Album Artist as an optional playlist column. Keep it minimal.

After fixing one error, this worked, except that I didn’t know the Album Artist is different from Composer. So:

Which of the songs have an album artist? Many have a composer. Is it possible to display the composer in VLC?

It told me to add Composer. I told it to add Composer instead of Album Artist, and had a few iterations:

How can I run a binary directly in my Ubuntu host instead of via Docker?

Is there a clean, portable way of installing what’s required?

Give me the (minimal) commands I should run to install.

How should I commit these?

That gave me two commits and a working VLC with the Composer field!

This is the version I’m using now.

The ability to tweak a daily-use software with 15 minutes of supervision in a language I don’t know feels really powerful!