This is my first post here (I actually registered to post this a few weeks ago, but for some reason it never sent me a confirmation email.  I just tried logging in again and it seems to be working, but anyway...).  I'd like to start off with how great a player Amarok is.  Almost everything I liked about iTunes (random mix, nice UI, works even better on large collections, good iPod support), plus even more goodies.

Also, I'm not 100% sure which forum I should put this in.  Seems like it could go in Usability, Help, or here.  So feel free to move it to where ever it belongs.

That said, I was loving the addition of labels in the recent build.  I've used them to replace a few of the playlists I had set up with smart playlists, since it's so much easier to add a label to a song (when your in the context menu) then it is to add it to a playlist.  Then I had an idea:
There are some songs I have in my library that don't want to listen too for whatever reason (mostly "talking" or sound-effects tracks from albums in my collection), and if I made a smart playlist with something like [Label Does not contain: "Do not play"] and use that for the source for a dynamic playlist random mix instead of the default full collection then I could just tag them when they came up and never listen to them again.  In addition, since there are a few reasons I don't want to listen to some songs, I could tag them with that reason (For example, "Do Not Play, Sound Effects") so I would be able to know why if I looked at them later.

So here's the problem:  That's not the way the Label Does Not Contain smart playlist works (or any of the other Label + Not x, like Label + is Not, label + does not start with, whatever).  I think this'll be easier to explain this with some help from a quick example, so here goes:

Take 4 songs with tags and 3 smart-lists
Song 1 - Labels: "Playlist 1"
Song 2 - Labels: "Playlist 2"
Song 3 - Labels: "Do not play, Interview"
Song 4 - Labels: (none)

Playlist 1: [Label Contains "Playlist 1"]

• Song 1

Playlist 2: [Label Does Not Contain "Do Not Play"]

• Song 1
• Song 2
• Song 3

Playlist 3: [Label Does Not Contain "Playlist 2"]

• Song 1
• Song 3
• Song 3

Playlist 1 above is the first playlist I talked about (A playlist for all songs with a certain tag), and it works fine.  Playlist 2 was the first place I noticed something strange.  I had expected all the songs I hadn't tagged with "Do Not Play" (1, 2, and 4) what I got was every song I had tagged with anything (including the do-not-play songs).  This was a little strange, so I did some investigating.

The result/reason can be seen in Playlist 3.  Basically, the problem is that it takes every label, compares it to the condition, and if it passes then it adds all songs with that label.  So what happens in playlist 2 is that Song 3 is checked twice, once for "Do Not Play" and once for "Interview."  What happens is that the song ends up getting rejected for "Do Not Play" but then added for "Interview" (which does not contain "Do Not Play").  In playlist 3,  of the labels on song 3 are "Playlist 2", and since both of the labels pass the song is added once for each label.

I had another thought about situations this would lead to unexpected behavior:  Create two smart-lists like the first one (one for "contains label 1" and one for "contains label 2").  Now imagine you want to make a playlist that merges these two smartlists (and there is some overlap between them), you would expect that a smart list that [Matches any: "Contains label 1" + "Contains label 2"] would have each song with label 1 and label 2 in it.  While this is true, any song that contains both labels is added twice.

Some more quick testing showed me that other smart-list conditions do not have similar behavior (For example, [Matches Any: "Artist Contains Jimi" + "Artist Contains Hendrix"] only adds songs by "Jimi Hendrix" one time each).  That leads me to believe that the current behavior or smart-lists is different from the devs intended behavior, though of course I can't be certain.

Now, the strangest part about this is that I'm almost positive that the first time I tried this it worked as I expected, and although I don't recall updating Amarok between then and the time that it stopped working it's possible it snuck in in some apt-get upgrade while I wasn't paying enough attention (Sorry, I don't have a date/version number for when this happened besides a few weeks ago).

I'm using Amarok 1.4.5 on Ubuntu 7.04 with KDE 3.5.6 (actually not fully installed, I'm using Gnome for the window manager - just the parts amarok depends on).

Any information about this (especially if it'll be changed to work more so in a way like what I expected it too) is appreciated...

You might be best served posting this as a bug report to http://bugs.kde.org (unfortunately it involves yet another registration ). Sounds like a bit of a glitch in the way labels are handled... considering they were added much later than most other smart playlist stuff, they haven't had the rigorous field testing that the rest has been subjected to!

Good suggestion.  The registration process there went painlessly enough

Here's the report:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145925
(Unfortunetly I didn't notice the field to put in application version until after I submitted .. is there a way to go back and change it without re-submitting?)

just add a comment to the bug report with the version info.

edit: ah I see you put it in the body of the report anyway, don't worry.