extragear/multimedia/amarok/src

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

Keep or revert?

I don't really have a strong opinion, I just seemed to remember that
being one of the things that were discussed/agreed on. Sorry if I was
wrong. In any case I  do see the merits of having it the default view,
as people who have a freshly scanned collection might be hard pressed
to find their playlists otherwise. This is however less of an issue
now that switching to the User Playlist category and starting a rename
when adding an new playlist works...

- Nikolaj



On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Bart Cerneels <bart.cerneels at kde.org> wrote:
> 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
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