Albums

What it is

An album is a release project that groups tracks together. An EP, LP, single bundle, or any collection you want to release as one. It lives alongside your tracks in your team workspace and gives you a single place to manage cover art, collaborators, documents, and release details.

Albums move through a simple status: from first idea, through in progress, to ready to be released, and finally released. Once released (or scheduled), Aden can automatically save the album to your lifetime fans on Spotify.

Using it

Create an album. From your team's Albums page, click New album. Give it a title, artist name, and optional release date. You can add existing tracks during creation or later. The form asks which team the album belongs to, but when you belong to only one team that team is auto-selected so you don't have to pick from a list of one.

Add tracks. Open the album and drag tracks from your library into it, or add them from the album's track list. Each track slot has an order number.

Reorder the album. In the Record view, hover a row and drag its grip (always visible on touch) to move the track. The track numbers everywhere else follow at once: label copy, exports, the public album page and the phone.

Play an album from the list. Every album card and table row carries the same play button the track cards do, next to the title. Pressing it queues the whole record and starts at track 1, so the bottom bar's next and previous walk the album. A board card that writes out its Track list drops that button: the list sits right under the title, and each row's number turns into a play button on hover that starts the album from that track. The queue (one presigned URL per track) is resolved on that first press, not with the list: a board of albums would otherwise presign the whole catalogue's audio before painting a card. Albums with no tracks show no button. Turn it off with the Audio player card field.

Play the album. Hover the cover art in the right sidebar and press play: the album starts at track 1 and every track lands in the player queue, so the bottom bar's next and previous buttons walk the record. Each track row has the same button on its artwork, which plays the album from that track. A track plays its final version, or its first version when none is marked final; tracks with no audio are skipped.

Upload audio to create tracks. Both the create-album form and the album's Add tracks dialog take audio files directly. Drop a folder's worth of WAVs and each file becomes its own track on the album, in the order you dropped them. Titles come from the file names and stay editable before you save, and BPM, key, duration and the waveform are read off each file. Everything else about a track is edited on its own page afterwards.

Read the tracklist. The list view is rows, not cards: a number, the artwork, a play button, the title, then the track's release date, priority and status on the trailing edge. Rows tint on hover. Expanding a row shows that track's versions exactly as the track page does: the full version cards, the timeline, compare and Add version. The row opens once they are ready, its chevron spinning meanwhile. Open rows are kept in the URL (?expanded=12,34), and the server renders the versions only for those rows (TrackVersionsEmbed), so a closed row costs nothing. Playing a row queues the whole album from that track.

Switch how tracks display. The album's track section has a Display dropdown, same control as the tracks page, remembered in the URL (display): Timeline (the built-in default), Record, List (expandable rows with versions), Board (a kanban by track status; dragging a card to another column updates the track's status) and Recent (most recently updated first). The last view and order you pick become your default for every album, and the albums list remembers its own last view the same way.

Follow the album on a timeline. The timeline view draws the album the way a track page draws its versions: one rail, one card per track with the waveform of the version the album plays, its status and actions. The gutter shows the track's spot and when its newest version landed. Order in Display switches between Album order and By latest (newest version first, URL order=latest). The count button on a card opens that track's versions, the same embedded track page as the list rows.

Hear the whole record. The record view lays every playable track's waveform end to end, each as wide as it is long, above the running order. Each segment and row shows the track's cover. A short track is drawn at a minimum width (8% of the record, less on long albums) so it stays visible and clickable; times still use its real length. Click anywhere on the record to play the album from that spot; the counter shows where you are in the whole album. Hover a row's number to play the album from that track; click its title to go to the track page, where its versions live (rows don't open). Number, cover, title, version, status and length line up down the list. Playlists show this same list. Tracks without audio stay in the running order, marked "No audio yet". Crossfade beside Display sets how many seconds tracks overlap (Off, 3, 5, 10 or custom), the same setting as the player menu's. With crossfade on, the record draws it: each track overlaps the next by that many seconds, both waveforms fading across the overlap, and the running time counts the overlap once.

On the phone. The album screen draws the same record under its Play and Shuffle buttons: each playable track's waveform with its cover, sized by its length; tap anywhere to play the album from there. Play, Shuffle and a row's cover all queue the whole album (Shuffle in a random order), and the Crossfade pill beside the record sets the same account crossfade. The album endpoint (GET /v1/albums/:id) carries each track's waveform (96 bars) and duration_seconds for it.

Add or create tracks. The toolbar Add tracks menu offers Add existing (picker plus bulk audio drop) and Create track, which opens the full create-track form with this album already selected.

Browse the album list. /app/albums is the same list surface the tracks page is, built from the shared entity-list components: search on the left of the toolbar, then Filter and Display. Four views, remembered in the URL (display): Board (kanban by status, drag to change status), List, Recent and Table. On the board, Columns regroups the cards by genre, tags, artist, label or visibility instead of status; dragging between genre or tag columns rewrites that value, artist/label/visibility columns are view-only. The status board and the list also take the team's own album columns and sub-boards made from a tag or genre ("Pitching", "Vinyl"), the same way the tracks board does (see board-custom-columns). Album columns are their own set, apart from the tracks board's.

Select several albums at once. Hold ⌘ (Ctrl on Windows) on its own for a moment and the cards show checkboxes; ⌘+click picks them out. A shortcut like ⌘K never shows them. The action bar at the bottom moves the selection to another status or flips its visibility, and Escape (or the bar's close button) clears it. Same interaction as the tracks board.

Act on one album. Right-click a card, or use the ... in its corner: both open the album menu, the same one the sidebar shows, with every album page plus a filter box.

Choose what the cards show. The Display popover's card fields drive every view, the table included: cover, audio player, track list, tracks, status, collaborators, visibility, genre, tags, description, UPC, label, for sale, team, release/created/updated dates. Collaborators show as a row of avatars and names in the card, not under the title; an album nobody was added to shows its credited artist line there instead. Genre and tags each get their own editable row. Show empty fields turns an enabled-but-empty field into an inline add affordance instead of hiding the row.

Filter the list. Years, months, genres, tags, artists, label, teams, language, for sale, visibility, status, with/empty tracks and a created-date range, in the same popover layout as tracks: self-explanatory controls (years, months, Add date created, the Any / ... segmented rows) carry no heading, lists keep one with its own reset. A filter whose value the cards currently hide offers an eye that shows it on the cards. Filter combinations save as presets.

Edit details in the sidebar. The album detail's right sidebar mirrors the track sidebar: title and status under the cover art, a collapsed Details section with inline-editable visibility (public/private plus the public link's address), release date, genres (up to 5 chips, stored comma-joined in albums.genre), tags, UPC and created/updated dates. A release date in the past on an unreleased album highlights the date amber with an explanatory tooltip. Share and Download pin to the bottom; deleting the album lives in the album actions menu in the page header.

Edit release metadata. /app/albums/[albumId]/metadata is a row of tabs, remembered in the URL (tab), the same shape as a track's metadata page: Details (title, artist, UPC, credits), Platforms (find the release on streaming services and store its links), Submissions (pitches to labels), Sale (sell it through the shop add-on), Domain (give it its own address) and Licensing (the licences on the release, same scope as its documents). The lifetime-fans notice sits above the tabs, since it is about the release rather than any one tab.

Files & media in one place. /app/albums/[albumId]/files holds Artwork (covers and banners stacked), Media, Inspiration and Files (documents) as tabs on one page, remembered in the URL (tab), the same grouping a track uses. The cover appears on the public profile if the album is public. The old per-section URLs (/covers, /banners, /media, /inspiration, /documents, /licensing) redirect to their tab; old ?tab=covers / ?tab=banners links open Artwork.

See who worked on what. The album's Collaborators → People tab opens with the teams on the release, then a per-track credit list: one row per track with its collaborators' avatars, and roles and splits in each avatar's hover card. A record credited to the same lineup start to finish collapses to a single line instead of repeating identical rows; the breakdown only appears once the tracks actually differ. A track with nobody on it links straight to its own collaborators page.

Link a team vs add a collaborator. Two different jobs, and the People tab keeps them apart. Add collaborator credits one person on this album with roles and split percentages. Link a team (the team side of the Add dialog) hands a whole team access to work on it, one of yours or any team by handle (or anyone with the Invite link beside Add brings their own team), and credits nobody. Both live in the one Add dialog, so the page keeps a single row of actions on the tab row.

Invite collaborators. Use the Collaborators tab to send email invitations. Each collaborator gets split percentages (publishing, royalty, mechanical, sync, composition, master). Invited collaborators receive an email and confirm via a link; once confirmed their user_id is attached and their details populate.

Import from Spotify. If your team has a Spotify URL in its social links, use the Spotify import flow to pull in your existing discography. Choose which albums to batch-import; Aden downloads metadata and artwork for each.

The public album page. A public album's page shows the cover, the listen links and the tracklist in one card: each track's artwork, title, artist and length, with a "…" menu to open the track or copy its link. A track links to its own page once it is released. The tracks play on the streaming services the album links to, not on the page. The rows are the same as a public playlist's.

Move to released. When the album is ready, change its status to released (or ready to be released for a scheduled date). This triggers the lifetime fans workflow to save the release to fans who follow you on Spotify.

Organisation albums. A label, agency, or any other organisation can also run an album across its roster from Albums in the organisation workspace. The org creates the album, adds the participating artist teams, and pulls tracks from each team's catalog into one tracklist. Every artist keeps ownership of their own tracks and sees the album in their team's Albums list; the organisation manages the shared release project (status, details, teams, tracklist). Removing a team from the album takes that team's tracks out of the tracklist but never out of the team's workspace.

Several organisations together. An album can be co-managed by more than one organisation: the creating org invites partner organisations from the album's Organisations card, the invited org accepts or declines from its own Albums page, and once confirmed both manage the album with the same access. Each org adds artists from its own roster. Signing with multiple organisations also works at the submission level, for albums and tracks alike: each organisation keeps its own submission and contract record.