extragear/multimedia/amarok/src

[Dan Meltzer]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:58 AM, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
<nhnfreespirit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...

My Feeling is that people are going to be more likely to actively look
for the "my playlists" category than they are for the dynamic
playlists category, and as dynamic playlists are one of those cool
"this is why we love amarok" features, making it more discoverable to
users can only be a good thing.
>
> - 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Amarok-devel mailing list
>> Amarok-devel at kde.org
>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok-devel
>>
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