Improve the dynamic playlists

[Bart Cerneels]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 16:37, 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.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> The IUP ISI Amarok team
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> Amarok-devel mailing list
> Amarok-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok-devel
>

Hi Ludovic

Dynamic playlists are complicated and unfortunately the current
implementation will confuse more then help. And so I don't recommend
it as a student project.

As an alternative though I suggest to create an implementation of
Smart Playlists. These are lists of tracks generated by a query of the
collections.
If you ever tried the filter field of the "Local Music" category you
know what is possible. A saved playlist is basically this save result
that is automatically updated.

It's a 2 part project: the backend and the GUI. For both there is a
lot you can reuse.

You need an implementation of Meta::Playlist for smart playlists and a
PlaylistProvider. These implement the query logic and update the
playlists when a collection changes, is added or disappears.

The smart playlists should appear as a category under "Playlists".
This is easy to do thanks the PlaylistManager and it's infrastructure.
For creating and editing saved playlists I suggest you reuse the
Filter Edit dialog from the local music category. It should be
possible if you change it a bit to show the complete query in the
dialog. This change is also needed for the filter it's used for now
since it's quite unintuitive.

Feel free to ask question if you think this is a good project.

Bart