Hi!
I would love to have the possibility to limit the number of files which are shown in the collection: As it is possible to add only songs which meet a certain criteria to smart playlists, this limitation should also be possible for the collection.
In my opinion, this is for example very useful, if you use the computer to make music at a party. A lot of people have huge collections of music but only let\'s say 20% of it is \"partyable\". So it\'s very annoying to search through a collection of 400 artists, and 350 are out of question.

Not only criteria based on the mp3-tag should be included but also the possibility to (de-)select certain folders on the harddisk. So the dialog would be a mixture between those of smart playlist creation and collection setup.
Probably setting up certain profiles (party-profile, chillout-profile, goodnightmusic-profile ...) would make it perfect!

You\'ll probably say, that this is not necessary, but my experience is, that playlists at parties become very long and some songs are added not only twice but several times because there couldn\'t be found directly. This is because when you search the playlist for a song by entering it\'s title, you cannot change it\'s position. (And this is needed very often if you setup a playlist...) In most cases, the song is already in the playlist, but just on the other end... So keeping the playlist small and adding more songs directly from the (limited) collection would be very handy imho!


And reducting the size of the playlist is the keyword for my next suggestion:
I would love to have the option to activate a certain playlist mode, which marks songs when they have already been played. This marked songs should then be automatically positioned at the beginning or the end of the playlist, so that the area in which the dj has to search for music becomes smaller.
If marking songs is to complicate to implement, it would probably be easier to remove them from the playlist after being played a certain amount of times.



To summarize want I would like to have improved on / added to amarok:

- limiting size of collection, so that you can setup a kind of \"party music library\" (or \"chill out music library\" etc.) because playlists with more than 100 songs are uncomfortable to handle
- the possibility to have songs marked or removed from the playlist after being played a certain amount of times (like the party jukebox in itunes does)

I hope this is somehow possible to implement - I can imagine that the combination of both features would make amarok even more perfect than it already is!


Btw thumps up for 1.2beta1 - great work!!! Especially the new context-menu rokks!

Post edited by: david, at: 2004/11/29 22:52

You might check out Aaron Seigo\'s blog on feature requests. And his example of what a good one looks like.

Basically you should describe how your feature would work exactly in detail (with mock screenshots and such) instead of just the desired result.

Ok, let\'s give it a second try:

\"collection profiles\"
- Next to the search-field of the collection, there should be a button called \"collection profile\" or something like this.
[img]http://www.davidandres.de/amarok1.jpg[/img]
(when a profile other than the default is selected, the name of the profile should be shown instead of collection profiles, I think.)

- When clicking on the button a menu should open which shows already set up profiles and - at the bottom the option \"configure profiles\"
-------------------
Activate ...
- party
- chillout
- unnamed
______________
Configure profiles
------------------

- The dialog in which you \"configure profiles\"-dialog could look like this:
[img]http://www.davidandres.de/amarok2.jpg[/img]





Playlist option \"party jukebox mode\"
- The mode could probably be called \"party jukebox mode\" and I imagine that activating it with a click on \"party jukebox mode\" in the menu - for example under \"random mode\"
- Configuration of this mode could occur through the following dialog:
[img]http://www.davidandres.de/amarok3.jpg[/img]
(I imagine the options remove/mark and top/bottom to be realized with pulldown-menus.)
- Marked songs could have another background-color so that the marking is visualized.
- I think it would be sensible to reset the counter of the number of times a song has been played either when you close amarok or when (probably better) the party jukebox mode is deactivated.
- All marked songs should have the option \"reactivate song\" in the context menu so that it can be handled like it has not been played yet during this session.
- If the deactivated songs are put to the bottom of the playlist, playlist advance should stop when it reaches the marked songs.
- What do you think? Is it necessary to have the option to remove songs from the playlist? Especially in the situation of making music at a party this is not soo good, because when someone who wants to tune in a song sees that it is not in the playlist, he/she might think that it hasn\'t been played yet.


The reasons why I think this feature is useful is explained in my first post.

Hope this helps better

Post edited by: david, at: 2004/11/30 21:49

oops, just saw that it\'s in the wrong thread... unbelievable how confused one person can be )

Yes, a party-feature could be great.
I have another idea in adjunction to the already said:

It could be nice to add an \"auto DJ\" to amarok which could be especially usefull for parties:

1) If the playlist is not on repeat, random music from some chosen collection will be played whenever there are no more choices on the playlist.

2) When a new number is added to the playlist, amarok will play it as the next number and display \"Will be played as next number\" on the screen. Eventually it could be customized to auto-fade to any such new numbers.

3) Amarok keep on playing items from the playlist as long as it has not reached bottom and will in that case just move on with the random numbers from the selected collection/playlist.

Higher rated numbers should be played more likely.