Improve the dynamic playlists

[Ian Monroe]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Ludovic DEVEAUX
<deveaux.ludovic31 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We are students from Toulouse, France and we are working on Amarok as
> a university project. One our tasks is to work on the dynamic
> playlists.
>
> We already have studied the main functioning of the feature but we
> have now some questions.
>
> First, which way could we improve the algorithms ? For example, we can
> make tests of ga_optimize() to eventually use it in the code. Nikolaj
> Hald Nielsen told us some algorithms don't work the way they should,
> can anyone point out what we should focus on ?
>
> We would like to gather opinions about the dynamic playlists applet.
> Do you think it is usable and understandable for most users ? We think
> it's a bit too complicated at the moment. With your feedback we could
> make a proposal for enhancement.
>
> Thanks for your support.

Just to add to what Leo said...

The major problem with current dynamic playlist system is that its not
really honest. If you mark something as having a 0% probability of
happening it actually has no effect on the dynamic playlist. This is
because they are actually 'biased' playlists, so there is no concept
of 'NOT'.

Its talked on this page:
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/GCDS_Discussions/Dynamic_Playlists
under "Backend". Basically the UI makes it appear as though "selector"
based, but it isn't. Even ignoring the more complicated 'generator'
based feature also described, but just making it so that if a user
asks for "50% Jazz and 50% rock" it would honestly do that would be a
major step forward. (And also probably involve scrapping most of the
current code).

Of course it all depends on how much time you have.

Ian