extragear/multimedia/amarok/src

[Bart Cerneels]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Jeff Mitchell <mitchell at kde.org> wrote:
> Bart Cerneels wrote:
>> But to be honest the biased playlists are so complex neither Wendy nor
>> me were able to figure out what exactly it does last night on the
>> train.
>
> Really?
>
> It's a bit fuzzy what "fuzzy" means, but other than that it's not that
> difficult...
>
>

The main issues that Wendy brought up (from memory):
- The combobox for selecting a dynamic playlist makes it seem like
there can be only one dynamic playlist. It does not use the same UI
concepts as the rest of the playlist categories.
- The 2 Biases are very abstract and highly technical. This makes them
difficult to understand and no explanation can solve that.
- The UI with the Bias items is confusing. The elements with the add
buttons look to similar to the ones with the minus button.
- There are no tracks in a dynamic playlist because it is a mode that
has to be turned on (this is how I explained it). This is again a
difference with the other playlist categories. "If it's a mode and not
a playlist, why is it in the playlist tab?"

I realized immediately these are major problems. I don't see how
anyone less technical then the average free software hacker will be
able to figure out this feature. Frankly: it's so complex it will
scare most people away from it.

But I think we can remedy this with 2 interventions:
1) fix the UI:
- We should show saved dynamic playlists in a list view with
"click-through" to the configuration UI. We plan to do the same for
the "saved playlists" and "podcasts" categories.
- Move the bias add buttons to a separate widget on top of the actual
added list of biases.
- Preview a number of selected tracks based on the current settings.
i.e. run the dynamic playlist for x results without adding them to the
queue. This makes it clearer to the user what the biases do.

2) Add more, easier to use, biases
- "Similar artists from Last.fm" for instance: this would restore the
1.4 "similar artists" dynamic mode. Added bonus thanks to the Bias
system: no hard dependency on last.fm and we can use different
recommendation engines.
- "Similar tracks based on audio fingerprinting" a.k.a. Sorens GTACFeat
- "Tracks from a saved playlist": as an alternative to the queue
feature as Leinir suggested at the devsprint.
- "Tracks from a collection": which was proposed on the amarok ML 2
days ago. Would play all tracks by artist/album in alphabetical order
until there are no more.
and so on. Each service could potentially add biases that can be used.

Bart