Hi. I'm new to Amarok, and I want to build a smart playlist. Basically, I have a lot of music on my computer, but about a third of it is made up either of things like podcasts or just songs for which I am only rarely in the mood. On iTunes, I used to have a smart playlist I used to automatically include the bands that I more consistently enjoyed (well, to exclude those that I didn't).

Obviously, this meant that the list of conditions was very long, since I had to define every single artist that I wanted to be included. It was manageable, though, because iTunes set the list of conditions within a frame which could be scrolled up or down. In Amarok, this is not the case, meaning that I can only define about 20 bands to be included before the Smart Playlist Edit window exceeds the entire height of the screen and becomes unusable.

What can I do to solve this problem? Surely it's pretty obvious that a scrollbar should be available for this feature - is there a way for me to enable scrolling, for example?

Have a look at some of the other conditions, rather than just listing bands - maybe genre can be used, or file path - alternatively, try the exclusion rules instead, and combinations of the above.

For example, I have a playlist that is along the lines of "all tracks with the genre of trance, but not fatboy slim".
Of course this means you might have to do some tag editing, but I find all in all, the smart playlists are more flexible than itunes (ymmv).

Well, that's a workaround, but it isn't really a solution - the fact remains that the edit menu doesn't accommodate complex smart playlists. Thanks for the ideas, though.

Really, the only option in this case would be for me to have the playlist include any music with a certain tag. If I did that, however, I might as well just be manually adding songs to the playlist, and that defeats the purpose of the smart playlist.

Is there a way to manually edit the smart playlist? - Is it stored in a text file, xml, or even a SQL query somewhere?


EDIT:
I found the file in which smart playlists are stored. It's an xml file located at:
~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/smartplaylistbrowser_save.xml

Hope this helps anyone else having the same problem.