Automated Playlist Generator: Congratulations! And feature request (Copy playlist result to Media player)

[Bart Cerneels]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 12:44, Christian Esken <esken at kde.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am quite happy about that new Automated Playlist Generator. Congratulations
> to that major improvement to Amarok.
>
> It is so much easier to understand than the dynamic playlist, for the
> following reasons:
> 1) It comes with good examples.
> 2) It has the big advantage that it the rule editor is in a separate dialog.
>     (I always found it very bad from a usabilty perspective, that the rule
>      editor can not be distinguisehd from the active rules itself).
>
>
>
> Now for my feature request: I would like to copy the results from the APG to
> my media player. Is it correct, that this is not possible at the moment?
>
> As far as I know this isn't specific to APG, but a general Amarok 2
> limitiation. You cannot copy playlists, APG, dynamic playlists or even the
> currently active playlist or Podcasts to the media player. Am I right here, or
> have I just missed the functionality?
>

The short answer is that it's partially available.

The framework for copying playlists exists and some implementations
use it (iPod, MTP). Those are supposed to work, but certainly not
without bugs. They also miss an important feature: they don't copy
tracks over. Everyone is more then welcome to fix and improve this.
The currently active playlist can be copied directly to an attached
device using the save button at the bottom of the playlist (long
press).

Podcast copying requires more development. There already is support
for USB Mass Storage devices but missing for iPod. I don't know if
it's possible to support it for MTP devices. The biggest missing
feature is automatic syncing, which would be required to make this
feature usable for day-to-day use.

APG doesn't use the generic Playlists framework and so can't be copied
or synced to devices. It will have to be refactored in order to make
it's playlists available to the rest of Amarok and will get
copying/syncing for free.

Bart