Proposal: generalize playlist concept - short version with pics

[Pavel Shved]

Seb Ruiz wrote:
> Aside from internal infrastructure changes, from a user perspective,
> how would this be different from what we have now?

 From user perspective the Queue is a visible and editable list that is 
separate from playlist.

At the zeroth place, the presence of singleton Queue will 
desingletonizate the Playlist and user will get several of them 
available at once with easy switching between them via tabbed view on 
the fly.

At the first place, user will gain visualization of what will be played 
in near future, what is enqueued, how his playlist is being traversed, 
what track will playback stop after etc.   I think that the queue window 
would look nice.  Imagine:

Queue:
...
+-----------------------------+
|     Far Above The Clouds    |  <--- previous track (if you press
+-----------------------------+       "Prev") button.
| >>> To France               |  <--- current track
+-----------------------------+
|  *  Oops, i did it again    |  <--- manually enqueued track.
+-----------------------------+
|     Dark Star               |  <--- tack from factory that gives us 

+-----------------------------+       overview of what will happen soon
| +++ Pick from collection    |
| +++ with BIAS:              |  <--- special `factory' track that will
| +++ 100% artist = M.Oldfield|       keep yielding more tracks to Queue
| +++ 100% rating > 5         |
| +++ approx 200 tracks left  |  <--- approximate number of tracks,
+-----------------------------+       estimated with use of maths.
| +++ Pick random track from  |
| +++ collection (infinitely) |  <--- filler factory that doesn't let
+-----------------------------+       the music stop.

Queue is big?  But in this particular case playlist may be hidden at all 
(it includes most random picking rules).  Assume you want to stop after 
Dark Star track.  You ctrl+click it and the queue will look like that:
...
| >>> Oops, i did it again    |
+-----------------------------+
|     Dark Star               |  <--- tack from factory that gives us 

+-----------------------------+       overview of what will happen soon
|//// PLAYBACK STOPS HERE ////|
+-----------------------------+
| +++ Pick from collection    |
...

The user gets (a) information and (b) control of what's going to be 
played in near future.  Queue nature also features correct handling of 
"Previous track" button pressing.

Isn't it what you were trying to achieve with Queue concept?

At the second place, advanced users will gain playlist `programming' 
feature and will be able to mix complex playlists by putting factories 
in different playlists and   I won't stop mentioning `party mode' as an 
example of it (where every user can have arbitrarily complex playlist 
containing factories as well).  Hierarchical biases fall into the same 
category.  I do believe that this concept will let us to discover more 
features with time.


Pavel Shved aka shvedsky
<pavel.shved at gmail.com>