Queue support and The Playlist

[Bart Cerneels]

Hi all,

I promised to start a discussion about the queue manager.

Fact: users want the queue manager back:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171939

In my mind The Playlist is a queue, and the order of tracks in there
is the order they will be played. I couldn't imagine anyone trying to
use it any other way. In fact, when I learned about the queue manager
I literally didn't understand it's use-case.
Now I've realized that the people who use the queue manager for a
couple of different reasons:

1) Playlist editor:
Because Amarok doesn't have a separate playlist editor, people started
using the PlaylistView like the Juk editor. Not wanting to destroy
their precious works of (playlist-)art, mainly sort order, they use
the queue-manager to play those tracks in an order other then the
list-order.
note: they could have just saved the playlist to disk and then
rearranged, but the human mind probably perceives that as destroying
previous work. We can't blame our users for being human, even tough
they want us to be super-human.

2) Single click queue adjustment:
Not everyone enjoys drag and drop. Especially if you want to arrange a
large number of tracks fast clicking is easier. The queue-manager
allows you to do that with Ctrl+"Right Click".

   There might be other use cases. Reply if you can think of some.

These are both useful features, both of which are missing in Amarok 2.
A straight port of the queue manager from 1.4 would indeed solve 2)
and allow users to do 1) sort of like before. But we still have the
opportunity to rethink the concept now and implement it in a simpler
way.
So I propose we solve both separately, a Meta::Playlist editor and
added functionality to PlaylistView for queueing.

One click queueing we could easily implement with a mode that sends a
track to right below the playing track when left-clicked (think
touchscreen). Or use the middle button for this regardless of mode.

I propose to make a playlist editing plasmoid to cover 2) and make
mass tagging like in 1.4 possible. This should obviously be a
spreadsheet view, which some users can't seem to do without. This
would *not* be a queue editor. But since playlists can be saved,
edited and then loaded in the queue the functionality is the same, if
not better. It also allows any group of tracks from a Meta::Playlist
to be added to the queue.
We could still implement queue sorting in the way leinir proposed [1]
but at least it will be used for queue ordering and not the only, or
the prefered, UI for playlist editing.

Now I understand Seb has queue-manager for 2.0 in a git tree. So
perhaps it's similar to what I propose or a port from 1.4, need to see
the code. Anyway I've started on the middle-click queue adjustment
already, the playlist plasmoid is something I want for 2.1.

[1] http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/810-The-Old-style-Playlist-Is-Dead,-Long-Live-The-Old-style-Playlist.html