amarok suggestion

[Rich]

Nick Andrew wrote:
> Amarok's an awesome application.
> 
> One thing which would increase its awesomeness is if I can select a song
> which it is playing, or some other song, and have a menu item "add to
> playlist..." so I can add a specific song to a specific playlist.

you can drag tracks from main playlist into playlistbrowser - and 
straight into any playlist you have created there. does this do what you 
want ?
you can also drag tracks from the collection browser, just drag it over 
'playlists' tab and hover for a moment.

> It's an idea suggested to me by an article I read at 43folders.com
> where the author suggests keeping a playlist of instrumental tracks.
> I'm thinking that it would be nice if amarok can build this list on
> the fly as I listen to normal music.
> 
> Also I have a rather large music collection most of which was played
> with xmms, so when I select the playlist "never played" it selects
> several weeks worth of music. Of course I can't listen to all that;
> the "never played" should have some parameters - e.g. like the smart
> playlists, to populate only a certain number of tracks, or to function
> like a filter.

it sounds like you are an ideal candidate for trying out dynamic playlists.
go to the playlist browser, create a new dynamic playlist. set it's 
source to be 'never played', load your now playlist.

> For example the main playlist could be "play random tracks" and that
> could be filtered through tests like "never played" or "new tracks" or
> test the genre.

create some smart playlists (or just one of them) that has tracks you 
need (based on genres, artists, years or whatnot).
create a new dynamic playlist that draws tracks from these smart playlists.

> Speaking of genre testing, I have a lot of spoken word / audio
> books / downloaded podcasts / educational materials. When I want
> to listen to music, I don't want to see any of that stuff. So it
> should be possible to filter certain genres _out_ of the artist list,

do you mean collection browser with artist list ? if so, try entering in 
the filter field -genre:<whatever_genre>

> playlists, random selection and so on.

create smart playlist that has conditions like never played & genre is 
not <that_genre>, base a dynamic playlist on this smart playlist (note 
that you can, of course, have several dynamic playlists :) )

> Also due to the size of my collection, if amarok decides it needs
> to do a new scan that tends to lock up my KDE task bar for minutes
> at a time (KDE responds to the input events after 30-60 seconds).
> You should really try to not have amarok take over my desktop when
> it has some substantial work to do.

is this a full scan or incremental scan (initiated by amarok itself) ?
which database are you using and how many tracks do you have in the 
collection ?

> Here's another suggestion ... keep the track rating visible in
> the task bar while the song is playing. If I miss the momentary
> announcement of the song's start, I don't know if I rated it or
> not and I have to go to the playlist window to check, before I
> hit alt-4 or whatever to rate the track.

i don't use ratings, but maybe global shortcut win+o helps - this will 
pop up osd and you should be able to see rating there.

> Nick.
-- 
  Rich