Spreadsheet, Playlists, Tag Editing, and Queuing

[Jeff Mitchell]

There's been a lot of heated back and forth about alternate playlist
views, a 1.4-style spreadsheet view, etc.

I have an idea that I think might be palatable to everyone, restores
some missing 1.4 functionality, and ties into the queue discussion while
making the Queue Manager dialog unnecessary.  It will hopefully be
palatable to everyone because it's not a replacement playlist, but
rather a useful utility.

The proposal so far for the 1.4-style spreadsheet playlist has been to
have it as an alternate View on the Playlist.  However, this either
requires taking up the space of the context view, or means the columns
would be so squished as to be unusable.  So, having such a playlist as a
permanent option totally detracts from the A2 experience.

However, the spreadsheet view is very good for tagging (not mass
tagging, mind you...there are better ways both within Amarok and without
to do that), but for quick one-off tag edits and fixes as you see the
messed up tags in your playlist.  Right now, doing this inside A2 is
fairly onerous and involves a pretty complex dialog.

So, here is my proposal.  We have a view that can only be activated on a
temporary basis.  It is not a playlist; it cannot be used in a permanent
fashion or to activate tracks for playing.  And it is made temporary by
(for instance) closing it when the mouse moves off of it.

What it does is it puts a spreadsheet view of the playlist tracks over
(for instance) both the collection view and the context view so there is
plenty of horizontal space.  In this view, columns show common tags and
metadata, and these can be edited in a quick fashion as they could in
1.4.  On one side is a column that shows numerical queue position, which
allows for quick editing of the queue position of each track (if a
particular track is queued to begin with).  This is something that was a
chore even in 1.4 with the queue manager...if you wanted to swap the
positions of two items in the queue, it could be arduous and take a lot
of mouse clicks.  Here, if we provide direct numerical access, it is
very easy.

This would make it very easy to adjust the queue and to do quick tag
edits, while not detracting from our A2 style graphical goodness, more
compact playlist.  A separate queue manager would also be unnecessary.

Feedback appreciated.

--Jeff