Karma style playlist options

[haroldpark]

Hey all.
I used to have a Rio Karma until the seemingly inevitable hard drive issues took it from me. While I loved the gapless playback and all I am realising that one of the things I loved most about it was its on-the-fly playlisting abilities. Later versions of Rockbox seem to capture most essentials but there were a couple of things that the Karma did that I am wondering if they are being considered and/or if they are already implemented and I just don't know how to set it up.
The first was the ability to Remove from a playlist any track by a particular artist or from a particular album, instead of having to remove them all separately. That was pretty sweet.
The other thing I am wondering is there any way for a dynamic playlist to be retained without the "Repeat All" switch set. At present if you don't have this enabled and you reach the end of a playlist then it all just vanishes into the ether. With the karma the default was that the playlist hung around whether you paused or stopped the player until you actively replaced it. This just seems more natural to me rather than having to keep it on endless loop and not use the stop button to interrupt playback.
One more thing. I am now using an iRiver h120. The joystick can be a little....fiddly. A few times I have spent large ammounts of time creating an on-the-fly playlist only to accidentally do a short press instead of a long one on the joystick and I lose all 30 or whatever songs in my playlist as it begins playing only the song I meant to add. Is there a way to give a warning when one is about to erase a dynamic playlist like this. Ironically the "Warn when erasing dynamic playlist" switch does not seem to help for this.
Thanks to anyone who got this far.
hh

[Llorean]

For the "Remove all songs by an artist" or "from an album" the playlist would actually need to know what artist or album any given song is. It doesn't really, since a playlist is actually just a list of filenames. To do that it would have to scan the whole playlist, open every song, and read its ID3 info.

To solve one of your problems, if you press Stop, you can resume the dynamic playlist by tapping the Play button. That lets you stop playback and then continue it later.

I don't know why you want to keep a dynamic playlist around when you reach the end if you DON'T want it to repeat. If you want to save a playlist save it, if you want to hear it again, use repeat, if you don't want it, leave repeat off.

As for the "Warn on clear" thing, I *think* that's a bug.

[dunno]

If you want to keep a paritcular playlist why not save it, to root or to playlist catalog.

[Febs]

One more thing. I am now using an iRiver h120. The joystick can be a little....fiddly. A few times I have spent large ammounts of time creating an on-the-fly playlist only to accidentally do a short press instead of a long one on the joystick and I lose all 30 or whatever songs in my playlist as it begins playing only the song I meant to add. Is there a way to give a warning when one is about to erase a dynamic playlist like this. Ironically the "Warn when erasing dynamic playlist" switch does not seem to help for this.

That is odd.  "Warn before erasing dynamic playlists" works perfectly on my H120.  It *should* work, as it was design to deal with the exact problem you are describing.  Are you absolutely certain that you have it set to 'on'?

[Llorean]

Febs: I can confirm that it's doing absolutely nothing on my H120 at the moment. The build is very _slightly_ old (two weeks). If it works in a newer build, it's possible that it was broken during the period he was trying it, in which case:

Update your build and see if the problem goes away.

[Febs]

(Febs checks his H120.)

For the sake of providing a data point for bug-killing, it works on mine with build 060904-1511.  If I have a chance before I go to bed, I'll test a newer build.

[Llorean]

Mine's 06-08-29 and not working. As I said, a bit old.

[bascule]

Well, mine is 06-08-15 on an H120 and the 'warn before erasing dynamic playlist' is working fine for both Filetree and ID3 browsing.

The first was the ability to Remove from a playlist any track by a particular artist or from a particular album, instead of having to remove them all separately. That was pretty sweet.

Yeah, that was one of my most-used playlist functions on my Karma and I miss it...

[nls]

The first was the ability to Remove from a playlist any track by a particular artist or from a particular album, instead of having to remove them all separately. That was pretty sweet.

I think this sounds like a nice feature and could probably be implemented in the tagcache browser, like a context menu thing for an album or artist "Remove from current playlist" would get filenames from the cache like when adding to the playlist, it could probably be done for a folder in file view too.

Have you filed a feature request?

[gorman]

For the "Remove all songs by an artist" or "from an album" the playlist would actually need to know what artist or album any given song is. It doesn't really, since a playlist is actually just a list of filenames. To do that it would have to scan the whole playlist, open every song, and read its ID3 info.

Could this be limited to people using the database option?

[gorman]

Apart from what I asked  in my previous post, I'd like to make a strong case about playlists *not* erasing themselves at the end of their playtime.

You say "save it", "why do you want it around if you haven't saved it", etc. But this behaviour is unlike any media player I have ever seen in my life.

What's the usefulness in having the dynamic playlist erasing by default at the end. What can one gain this way? Why is it that all other players work differently (foobar, Winamp, Karma, Zen, whatever I've ever tried, really)?

[woodensoul]

I actually have a Karma in practically brand new condition, but it hasn't seen hardly any use because I love Rockbox so much.  Anyone interested, let me know.

As for the playlist features, I would also like to see this implemented, in addition to Zen Xtra style playlist viewing and manipulation.  The Zen Xtra allows you to view tracks in the playlist grouped by how they were added.  For example, if you added an entire album, it will display the album name in the playlist and you can move the tracks in the album up or down in the playlist as a group.  It works the same way with artists and genres.  Also you can expand each heading (artist, album, genre) to see each track in the playlist.  Additionally, albums, artists or genres can be removed from the playlist as with the Karma.  I like this feature very much and it is one of the very few things that I wish Rockbox did, but can't yet.

[Llorean]

Bear in mind, Rockbox uses a standards based playlist format, M3U. Many of these features aren't possible with standard M3U playlists, as Rockbox has both no metadata about the song, nor any stored information about how it was added.