Queue support and The Playlist

[Gary Steinert]

On Tuesday 16 December 2008 14:44:02 Bart Cerneels wrote:
> 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.

I would like to put my use case forward.

When i build a playlist, i tend to use it quite a lot, but I'm not always in 
the mood to listen to all the music in it. I use the queue manager to select 
those tracks i want to listen to and play them in order, without having to 
select a new track every time the last one finishes (kinda counter productive 
when you're trying to work!).

The reason I don't want to re-arrange my playlist is simply because, after a 
day or two, I know where many of the album are within the list. If i 
rearranged the playlist every time I felt like listening to a different track 
it would eventually (I'm talking within a session here, so saving wouldn't 
help a great deal) get well out of hand.

Also, in order to rearrange the playlist, I would have to:
 - Find the track i wanted to play
 - Find the currently playing track in the playlist
 - Drag the next track and try to drop it in the right place to be played next

I would then have to repeat this for every track

With a queue manger:
 - Find the track
 - Click (or more than likely click a menu item)

And in an ideal world, i could select multiple tracks and queue them all at 
once.

I realise you probably covered parts of this in your own use cases, but I 
thought you might find it useful to have a view from someone who would 
actually use a queue manager and would quite like to see it back in Amarok 2 
=)

Gary Steinert

> 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,-Lon
>g-Live-The-Old-style-Playlist.html
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