Playlisting

[Llorean]

If you only put the songs in one playlist, and your songs are already tagged, what's the problem exactly? It sounds like you should already be able to find them in the database then using a well created custom tagnavi...

I apologize for seeming to press on this issue, but it's really unclear where exactly you're finding yourself unable to make effective use of your player - if your files are tagged well and your tagnavi is set up well, it seems like you should already have easy access to sorted lists of your files. Rather than going back to "playlisting should work this way" we should clarify exactly what you cannot do with the existing functionality so that it's easier to determine what the actual shortcoming is other than "it doesn't work how the Apple software does."

[soap]

Ok, so it sounds as if Apple is presenting the playlist as if it were a filesystem?

I think I'm getting a grasp of this.

If so that's a pretty neat user interface idea.
 

[Llorean]

The problem with that is that people who currently use a playlist as "a list of songs to play" will lose the ability to launch one with a single click if clicking on them becomes the "view playlist" button instead of the "play playlist" button.

Maybe something should be in the context menu?

[soap]

Thinking only of iPod for the moment, would need to check other keymaps, but we have two keys (select and forward) which both launch a playlist.  One could "explore" the playlist.

[Llorean]

I'm not going to comment for all devices, but the vast, vast majority of them have "select" and "forward" as separate functions.

The idea has been proposed in the past to use one as purely navigation (can't accidentally play files with it) and the other as "begin playing the selection" to allow quickly playing folders by just tapping select on them rather than browsing into them and then selecting a file, but it never gets past the discussion phase.

[darkenvy]

"Ok, so it sounds as if Apple is presenting the playlist as if it were a filesystem?"
Yes! I wish I thought of saying that in the first place 


I love the idea of remapping one button purely for navigation. Forward does the same function as select anyways right? Now as for the previous attempt never getting past discussion phase, at least we know that several people would be interested in this project becoming a reality. Now it's just a matter of actually getting work done.

[JdGordon]

I actually thought you could view the contents of playlists and add them so I was a bit surprised to actually try it now and find that you could indeed view playlists but only add tracks to other playlists in the catalog and not to the current playlist (which is rather stupid!)

I assume that it would be relatively simple to fix the playlist viewer to add tracks to the current playlist which would mean <highlight playlist> - context menu - playlist - view - highlight track - context menu - insert (which admittedly its amazing)

I think the far nicer option is the default action on .m3u is to view it exactly like the apple OF does, the reason for changing this action is this:
1) people who want to replace the current playlist with the one they selected would need one extra press (press OK once the viewer is open)
2) people like darkenvy would have 4 actions less to acheive what he wants
3) people who want to insert the playlist in any way other than replacing it have no change because the context menu on the m3u is needed for all the insert/queue/shuffle options.

I'm not going to get into the discussion about having >> and select do different things because it wont end (ever), but the change above sounds perfectly acceptable and actually logical

[darkenvy]

So what to do? I'm interested in this kind of mod but don't even know where to start.

[JdGordon]

see the mailing list... the only suggestion with any opposition is making .m3u open by default instead of start playing.. the rest just needs time and someone to do it (I'm very slowly doing going to do it unles someone else wants to)

[Llorean]

I'd personally prefer M3U not open by default, but I think it's the best way in terms of expanding usability / power.

One compromise might be to have M3U launch by default in the normal file browser, but "view" in the playlist viewer when accessed through the catalog. It's not perfect, but it does expand the functionality without, for the most part, losing much (if you just want a list of playlists to launch, you can simply store them in the folder - the catalog is more for constructing them anyway).

[audio-i]

Taking the opportunity of playlists being discussed, and quoting from the mailing list

Rockbox mail archive
Subject: brain dump regarding playlist management
From: JdGordon
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:53:02 +1100
...
So, opinions? Other complaints about playlists that could be worked in?

There are two adjustments I always thought that would be useful, specially for "playlist oriented" users:

1- When a playlist is saved, the WPS should be able to display the playlist name, i.e. the playlist name should be updated with the said name, and a WPS using the %pn tag should display the new name from that moment on.

2- When playback is started through a playlist (or according to 1-, the dynamic playlist is saved and therefore "has a name"), and the playlist gets modified(*), it would be great that the base playlist name could reflect this. This could be achieved by adding a "*" or a "(mod)"  to the original playlist name in %pn, like "PlaylistName*"

Perhaps this suggestions could also be "slowly considered" 

------
(*) by modified I mean tracks added or deleted in any way, I would exclude the cases when the playlist is just reshuffled or when only the playback order is just changed in any way

[AlexP]

It'd be really useful to reply to mailing list e-mails on the mailing list as well, most devs are there and not here.

[audio-i]

I just subscribed... will do, thanks

[darkenvy]

Subscribed to the Rockbox-Dev list

[JdGordon]

Right, well i've been away from dev for a while but I got this pach pretty much finished so it would be great to get some testing and feedback.

if you can't build your own let me know your DAP and ill build for you.

patch is at http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/11808