merge request: Automated Playlist Generator

[Thomas Coopman]

Hi,

I'm also a user and it does looks very nice, very powerful.
Maybe a bit too hard like Colin just said.  But disregarding that, I
was wondering if you could also filter on tags.  I don't know if this
is possible already because I didn't see it in the video.  I believe
this would be the first feature in Amarok that uses the tag.

Thomas

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 06:10, Colin Kern <colin.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> Disclaimer: I am not an Amarok developer, just a user.
>
> I would like to have this feature, but as you say the UI has a lot of
> room for improvement.  The biggest thing that jumped out at me was
> naming all the rules.  Why is that necessary?  Just displaying the
> value and constraint is descriptive enough, I think.  Another issue I
> have (and this is also an issue with dynamic playlists) is the
> strictness value is not very clear.  If it's doing the same thing as
> the fuzzy bias in dynamic playlists (controlling the standard
> deviation) then referring to it as a percentage from 0 to 100 doesn't
> really make much sense and it isn't clear to the user what it's doing.
>  I'm not sure how hard this would be, but I think a good way to
> present this would be to show a margin of error, so for example if
> they were setting the duration of the track, the text of the slider
> might say "+/- 0:30".  Of course, since the math involved here is a
> normal distribution, you can't say that definitely, but maybe have
> that number be the span of 2 standard deviations (95% confidence).
>
> If I have some spare time, I will clone your repository and play
> around with the feature some to see if I get any more ideas.
>
> Colin
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 10:25 PM, Soren Harward <stharward at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've created a merge request for the Automated Playlist Generator:
>>
>>     http://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok/merge_requests/148
>>
>> If you want to play with the code, you can get it from the "generator"
>> branch of my git repository:
>>
>>     http://gitorious.org/~stharward/amarok/stharward-work
>>
>> I've also uploaded a demo video to the AmarokStudios YouTube channel
>> (thanks, Lydia, for helping with this):
>>
>>     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6VEsvQNnjQ
>>
>> I wrote the APG because the current dynamic playlist/bias system still
>> hasn't achieved feature parity with the Smart Playlists of v1.4, and
>> the algorithmic parts of the bias system have some, IMO, serious
>> design flaws.  I will admit that the UI of the APG (particularly the
>> preset editor) is not as straightforward to use as the UI for the bias
>> system for dynamic playlists, and expect to make some changes based on
>> user feedback.  However, I think the current Preset Editor is no more
>> difficult to use than Smart Playlists in v1.4 were, and the cost of
>> getting over the learning curve is more than offset by the fact that
>> the APG actually does what you think it should based on what you see
>> in the UI, unlike the current bias system.  In other words, a
>> moderately complex UI with a stable backend that performs correctly is
>> preferable to a simple UI with an unstable backend that performs
>> unpredictably.
>>
>> --
>> Soren Harward
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>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok
>>
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-- 
Thomas Coopman
Thomas.coopman at gmail.com