Playlist Navigation (was: Queue Manager)

[Marius]

on Monday 08 February 2010 22:20 Bart Cerneels wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 22:00, Seb Ruiz <ruiz at kde.org> wrote:
> > Whilst I am not against the feature (I wrote it in 1.4), we did
> > explicitly remove the queue manager for Amarok 2.x. I can't remember
> > the exact reasoning, except that it was deemed overkill and
> > unnecessary in the face of culling features.
> >
> > Has there been any change in direction in this regard, and do the core
> > Amarok team regard the queue manager as a worthwhile and reasonable
> > feature to implement, regardless of who does the work?
> >
> > --
> > Seb Ruiz
> 
> Nope, I personally still think it's useless feature creep that will
> only increase the complexity of the  playlist.
> 

While I don't know about the previous discussion on the queue concept, I think in its current state amarok needs a queue manager. I guess we agree, that the user should be able to define which track or tracks are played next - be it because he personally likes them, or they are wishes by listeners (at a party), or whatever. If he is able to do that, he should be able to change that list of queued tracks. 

Furthermore he should be able to compose sets of tracks and easily play both 
whole sets (random or ordered) and single tracks from a set in a defined order.

Currently, these two goals cannot be (easily) achieved at the same time - 
suppose you have a saved playlist with maybe 100 songs. If you want to play 
them, you have to add them to the current playlist. If you want to play the 
tracks in random order, you have to switch on the random play mode. If you now 
want to play a specific track, you have to find it on the current playlist and 
queue it. If you do that for 3 tracks and want to change their order, you have 
to unqueue all of them and repeat the process of finding and queuing. I guess 
we agree, that this is not a good user experience. We can argue about the 
frequency of this use case, but I think its rather frequent.

One way out of this is a queue manager. But additional thought brought me to a 
new idea: if we had a way to use a non-random current playlist *and* still be 
able to play saved playlists in random order, the need for queue concept would 
be totally superseded. You could simply drag the tracks to be played next 
behind the currently playing track.

For that we would need a dynamic playlist which plays tracks from a saved 
playlist in either random or non-random order (*wah*, we have way to many 
things called playlist :) ). Ideally, this dynamic playlist could easily be 
"programmed" by rightclicking on an existing saved playlist and select 
something like "play now".

Additionally we have the problem, that the current playlist tends to become a 
mess of random tracks, like the desktop of older windows distributions, which 
makes navigating and ordering quite hard. That is because for anything you do 
with saved playlists, you need to put tracks on the current playlist. You 
can't drag tracks directly from the collection to a saved playist, but have to 
go the indirection through the current playlist. It's also rather hard to drag 
tracks from one playlist to another if you have many playlists or playlists 
with many tracks. If you want to create a new saved playlist, you even have to 
clear the current playlist, drag the desired tracks for the new saved playlist 
on it and save it - that's obviously not possible while playing another set of 
tracks.

Someone mentioned stunning features which render the queue concept useless. I 
guess by those features you mean thinks like suggested tracks and other dynamic playlists etc. While these are great at "discovering your music", they are useless for structuring your music and collecting those newly discovered tracks in sensible sets. For that we still need those saved playlists, which are currently rather hard to use.

Summing up, amarok in its current state needs a queue manager.
If we polish the handling of saved playlists, the queue concept is rendered 
useless. To achieve that, we need an easy way to access and navigate through 
saved playlists and an easy to use dynamic playlist, which plays tracks from 
saved playlists.
A decent saved-playlists-browser would be cool, probably with the possibility 
to open one or more playlists in a new window and drag tracks between them, 
the current playlist and the collection.



Sorry for this rather long post and thanks for reading and commenting,

Marius