Queue support and The Playlist

[Big O]

On Dec 16, 2008, at 10:13 AM, Gary Steinert wrote:

> 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.
Yes, sure. But sometimes I want to short circuit that queue with my  
own miniqueue and then return to normalcy. I don't get why people like  
the moodbar but hell, they did. If everything had to make sense we'd  
still be hunting and growing food for a living instead of shooting  
pixelated characters for the lulz.

>>
>
> 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.
Personally I think this is the kind of discusion which should go on in amarok at kde.org 
/#amarok/blog comments etc., not in the inner bowels of this secret  
society.
Having said that, I'm with M. Steinert. Sometimes I don't actually  
want the order of my playlist changed just to listen that one (group  
of) song(s) I get the urge to listen in the middle of a playlist.
Not being able to do this, btw, is one of the main reasons i HATE  
itunes.
>
>
> 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
And I am _extremely_ lazy and would rather not.
>
>
> 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".
This I never actually knew about. Sounds like what I want except for  
the whole automatically re-arraging the playlist that comes along with  
it. but then there's the undo button so...