Howdy. I am currently running Amarok 2.3 under Kubuntu and am wondering if there is any way to have two open playlists at the same time?

I semi-regularly have need to create a large playlist that I can copy to a portable device to use as backing music for gigs, group bike rides, etc. Amarok appears to only support a single playlist open at a time which essentially makes it useless for creating a new playlist unless you know exactly what it is you are looking for and do not need to hear it before adding it to the new playlist. What I need to be able to do is to load an album and scan through it and then drag tracks I want to the target playlist (rinse and repeat for a 100+ tracks).

What I have been doing is opening Exaile and Amarok at the same time, using Amarok for browsing and playing and the dragging tracks I want over to Exaile as the destination playlist. This process seriously sucks however as Exaile is extremely unstable. The ideal situation would be to have multiple playlist tabs in Amarok.

Am I just missing something and this is already supported in Amarok? If not, any suggestions for a second media player with decent playlist support that is more stable than Exaile under KDE4 / Kubuntu?

Cheers!

Why don't you save the playlist you like to transfer to the device using the little floppy icon. When you want to transfer it, load it again and copy over the tracks using the "copy to" menu action.

The reason we only support the single active playlist is because it's the queue for music that is being played, not a playlist editor. That is the job of the "User Playlists" section in the sources panel.

In future version (probaly 2.3.2) you'll be able to copy the whole playlist at once to the device, even synchronize it automatically.

Stecchino wrote:Why don't you save the playlist you like to transfer to the device using the little floppy icon. When you want to transfer it, load it again and copy over the tracks using the "copy to" menu action.

Hey Stecchino. The above answer does not seem to address my concern which is not being able to have multiple playlists open at a time. I am not asking for assistance in copying music to my player (though I do appreciate the response none the less).

Stecchino wrote:The reason we only support the single active playlist is because it's the queue for music that is being played, not a playlist editor. That is the job of the "User Playlists" section in the sources panel.

Ok. Please understand my confusion then as Amarok repeatedly calls the right pane the "playlist" as opposed to "the queue" and it behaves like playlists do in other music players.

I have looked at the documentation and also tried playing around with the "user playlists" section of Amarok 2.3.0. I would argue that this is not really a playlist editor as much as a playlist organizer.

To be able to build up a playlist from scratch, you need to be able to:

1. browse through your music
2. preview tracks
3. add tracks to a final playlist separate from the scratch pad one

The "Users Playlist" pane usurps the "Media" pane so it looks like you cannot have both open at the same time. To be able to create a playlist via browsing you would have to back in and out of the playlist manager to get to the media browser *every single time* you need to choose another track which makes it too cumbersome to use that way.

Further to that, the Users Playlist pane shows content as a single vertical list old school MacOS file manager style. Once you have more than a few playlists kicking around, this view becomes cumbersome. It is also error prone as it is too easy to accidentally drag and drop a track into the wrong playlist. If it was possible to have just the playlist being edited open this would avoid that issue.

Is there a way to have the media pane and the user playlist pane open at the same time? If so, this would at make creating playlists on the fly possible without using another player as the intermediary.

As a bonus question, is there a way to only show a single playlist in the "User Playlists" pane?

Cheers

This irritates me as well. Managing playlists in Amarok is frustrating. Having an interface laid out much like iTunes, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Songbird, Spotify, etc. works much better. You can preview the tracks you want and just drag and drop them to your playlist. I find the entire interface quite awful, actually.

Question: is Amarok different just for the sake of being different?

To be fair, if every application did things in exactly the same way, why have multiple applications to start with?

This is not to say that the way Amarok does things cannot be improved, but at least from my perspective, the reason I use Amarok over other music playing/management applications is because it offers capabilities other don't.

I'd rather see future development effort channeled towards refining "The Amarok Vision", than on making it look and work just like every other music playing/management applications out there.

I am not understanding your issues with playlists as defined in this thread.

moron wrote:I semi-regularly have need to create a large playlist that I can copy to a portable device to use as backing music for gigs, group bike rides, etc. Amarok appears to only support a single playlist open at a time which essentially makes it useless for creating a new playlist unless you know exactly what it is you are looking for and do not need to hear it before adding it to the new playlist. What I need to be able to do is to load an album and scan through it and then drag tracks I want to the target playlist (rinse and repeat for a 100+ tracks).

I'm not a developer, so this just an observation from another user.

Amarok only ever has one "open" playlist, the current one, which is displayed by default on the right.

You can browse through your saved playlists, select an entire playlist or individual tracks from saved playlists, then add the selected playlist/tracks to the current playlist or replace the tracks in the current playlist, which is a different thing than "loading a playlist", at least to my way of thinking.

Browsing the collection is similar, select artists, albums, and/or tracks and then choose to add to or replace the tracks in the current playlist.

When creating a new playlist this seems to me to provide everything you need, add the tracks you think you might want to the current playlist, preview the tracks, remove the ones you don't want, save the playlist, go to the saved playlists and rename the newly saved playlist with the desired name.

Editing of existing playlists threw me off at first because you will or will not be allowed to add tracks to saved playlists depending on which way the merged view button is toggled, when it's toggled the way that doesn't let you add tracks to an existing playlist the 'add folder' button is greyed out as well. So it seems as far as editing existing playlists goes, things are handled as well, but depending on the way the merged view button is toggled, you may have missed it.

Browse the collection, populating the current playlist with the tracks you wish to "preview", browse back to the saved playlists, start listening to the tracks in the current playlist, drag individual tracks to the saved playlist you wish to include it in as desired.

Personally if there was one thing I might want changed, it would be to have the option to choose a name when you hit the save button, as opposed to always having the playlist automatically named with the current date and time, then having to rename it after the fact, and going along with that if you try to save using the name of a playlist that already exists, be given the option to replace the previously existing playlist.

Later, Seeker

moron wrote:

Stecchino wrote:Why don't you save the playlist you like to transfer to the device using the little floppy icon. When you want to transfer it, load it again and copy over the tracks using the "copy to" menu action.

Hey Stecchino. The above answer does not seem to address my concern which is not being able to have multiple playlists open at a time. I am not asking for assistance in copying music to my player (though I do appreciate the response none the less).

Yes, sorry. I was trying to address the use case you might need 2 playlist view for. There are usually more solutions for the same problem. In this case the sollution I have in mind also happends to fit amarok's design principles.

moron wrote:

Stecchino wrote:The reason we only support the single active playlist is because it's the queue for music that is being played, not a playlist editor. That is the job of the "User Playlists" section in the sources panel.

Ok. Please understand my confusion then as Amarok repeatedly calls the right pane the "playlist" as opposed to "the queue" and it behaves like playlists do in other music players.

Yeah, that is an issue I've had problems with as well. It's not only confusing for users BTW, we developers are often talking about the "other" playlist. There are players that use the term queue or play-queue and in my mind that is better.

moron wrote:I have looked at the documentation and also tried playing around with the "user playlists" section of Amarok 2.3.0. I would argue that this is not really a playlist editor as much as a playlist organizer.

To be able to build up a playlist from scratch, you need to be able to:

1. browse through your music
2. preview tracks
3. add tracks to a final playlist separate from the scratch pad one

The "Users Playlist" pane usurps the "Media" pane so it looks like you cannot have both open at the same time. To be able to create a playlist via browsing you would have to back in and out of the playlist manager to get to the media browser *every single time* you need to choose another track which makes it too cumbersome to use that way.

Further to that, the Users Playlist pane shows content as a single vertical list old school MacOS file manager style. Once you have more than a few playlists kicking around, this view becomes cumbersome. It is also error prone as it is too easy to accidentally drag and drop a track into the wrong playlist. If it was possible to have just the playlist being edited open this would avoid that issue.

Is there a way to have the media pane and the user playlist pane open at the same time? If so, this would at make creating playlists on the fly possible without using another player as the intermediary.

As a bonus question, is there a way to only show a single playlist in the "User Playlists" pane?

The user playlist section is still evolving. The view should eventually only show one complete saved playlist at a time in the same style of the queue. To select a specific playlist there will be a drill-down UI like the one for the current file browser. And once you have a saved playlist open in the view you'll be able to add track from the collection to it directly via the Popup-dropper (the drop targets shown over the context widgets).

That should address all those issues.

In a way you'll have 2 playlist views then, only one will influence the playback queue though.

I am excited about this feature. Is there any progress on it in Amarok 2.4?

Cerapter wrote:I am excited about this feature. Is there any progress on it in Amarok 2.4?

The view has not changed much for 2.4 but the backend is a lot faster and efficient now. If you happen to have a lot of playlists the startup time should have dramatically improved.

Having more than one playlist open in tabs is the feature I miss the most in amarok. I just came once again to the wish because I searched in the collection for a specific term and thought I could drag the found songs to a playlist. But no, I then would need to save my current playlist (which I don't want because it is temporary for me), would need to close it, fill that new playlist, play some seconds of every song, save it, close it, open my standard playlist again - much too long-winded. I'd love to keep my current playlist without saving it, and I just want to add specific songs to it. But at the same time I want to be able to temporarily hear another song "collection". I really wonder that amarok does not offer this feature to easily switch between not saved temporary playlists, other music collection applications can do it.

JaKi wrote:Having more than one playlist open in tabs is the feature I miss the most in amarok.

This is exactly why i cannot use amarok on a regular basis. I love amarok and would love to use it all the time but i miss this feature so much.
Are there any news, if we will get a multiplay playlist feature in the future?

That was never a feature of Amarok, how can you miss that

Mamarok wrote:That was never a feature of Amarok, how can you miss that

Oh, what an honor, my question was answered my Mamarok.

But to come back to your question, i made the mistake and tried an other play.

Mamarok wrote:That was never a feature of Amarok, how can you miss that

I miss it though it never was in Amarok and I never used a player that has this feature (afaik e.g. MS Media Player). It is just something that feels natural for me. In my "workflow" I often want to do something that requires this feature and am stopped because it does not work. I cannot count how often I've wished I just could leave the current temporary playlist untouched and without saving it, just open another temporary one to test the new songs I downloaded. Or to create two or three or even more listings for two or three or more CDs (or just playlists for later usage) at the same time, this song in that playlist, next song into the other playlist (very common usecase for me). Or to compare several playlists. Or is this sorting of the songs better or that - without having to re-sort the current playlist.

My workaround is to open amarok, qmmp, audacious at the same - so many different players with playlists how I need playlists - and drag and drop from amarok into the playlists in the other players.

Please subscribe to this wish then: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249140

But please be realistic: this is not very high on the development priority as we only have so many developers available who work in their free time, so if you really want this you should find a developer with lots of time to actually implement it.