First of all, my first post here and kudos to the developers you are doing a good work. But the playlist handling is in fact quite bad in amarok.

The playlist sidebar unintuitive in the following ways,
1) Dynamic playlists are not playlists in the normal manner that users think about them, same as the dynamic playlist options. I don\'t understand why these are placed in the playlist sidebar. It\'s a bit confusing, the UI can be improved here although I am not really sure how.

2) Save -> Current Playlist / Save -> Current dynamic playlist, this is very unintuitive. Here playlist refers to the window at the right hand not to actual playlists (i.e the lists in the sidebar). The user doesn\'t really know what he is doing.

3) Creating a new playlist.
I can create a playlist by right clicking in the playlist window (right hand side) and select create playlist from selection and enter a name. This is all fine, the user doesn\'t need to and don\'t care where the playlist is stored (think of how iTunes handles this). On the otherhand the user can add a playlist from an m3u file via Add -> Playlist , is this playlist imported somehow into an internal playlist representation or will the m3u file be overwritten when I add tracks to playlist? This isn\'t clear and adds confusion. Why can\'t the user add (create a new empty) playlist from the Add menu directly?

4) When are playlists saved when you drag a track into them? There is a Save button in the toolbar but this doesn\'t let me save the playlist. Confusing. The ideal would be that the user needs to save, amarok takes care of everything but it doesn\'t now, if I drag a track into a playlist quits and relaunch amarok, the track is not in the playlist.

These are just a few ideas and impressions and I hope some kind of discussion could come out of this and possible some better ideas how to handle playlists in Amarok, it really needs it.

One idea would be to change terminology completely, there are currently atleast two completely different meaning when you talk about a/the playlist in amarok. There are also a lot of things in the playlist sidebar that are not strictly playlists.

Note, I wrote this down quickly so please ask me to clarify if needed.

Niklas wrote:

First of all, my first post here and kudos to the developers you are doing a good work. But the playlist handling is in fact quite bad in amarok.

A matter of opinion, but okay, that is yours. It probably could be better, but bad isn\'t very nice :p

The playlist sidebar unintuitive in the following ways,
1) Dynamic playlists are not playlists in the normal manner that users think about them, same as the dynamic playlist options. I don\'t understand why these are placed in the playlist sidebar. It\'s a bit confusing, the UI can be improved here although I am not really sure how.

Well, the problem here is that for some people they are playlists in the way they think about them. There are two camps here on this issue. I explain more below.

2) Save -> Current Playlist / Save -> Current dynamic playlist, this is very unintuitive. Here playlist refers to the window at the right hand not to actual playlists (i.e the lists in the sidebar). The user doesn\'t really know what he is doing.

the active playlist is always in the window in the right and the playlist management happens in the browser to the left. What is unintuitive about that?

3) Creating a new playlist.
I can create a playlist by right clicking in the playlist window (right hand side) and select create playlist from selection and enter a name. This is all fine, the user doesn\'t need to and don\'t care where the playlist is stored (think of how iTunes handles this). On the otherhand the user can add a playlist from an m3u file via Add -> Playlist , is this playlist imported somehow into an internal playlist representation or will the m3u file be overwritten when I add tracks to playlist? This isn\'t clear and adds confusion. Why can\'t the user add (create a new empty) playlist from the Add menu directly?

There is a lot in here and I\'m not sure exactly what you mean.

4) When are playlists saved when you drag a track into them? There is a Save button in the toolbar but this doesn\'t let me save the playlist. Confusing. The ideal would be that the user needs to save, amarok takes care of everything but it doesn\'t now, if I drag a track into a playlist quits and relaunch amarok, the track is not in the playlist.

We\'ve had big dicussions about this, and there are a lot of people that don\'t want their static playlists automatically because they added a couple of songs to them for a particular session. All saving is explicit except for the current playlist, meaning whatever is in the playlist window when you quit will be there the next time you start amaroK.

One idea would be to change terminology completely, there are currently atleast two completely different meaning when you talk about a/the playlist in amarok. There are also a lot of things in the playlist sidebar that are not strictly playlists.

But this is a problem we have, because there is a large group of people that think of everything in terms of playlist regardless of whether it is an m3u file or a dynamic list or a smart list. to them it is just playlist and the argument is that most users do not want to and should not need to understand the difference.

The problem that popular programs like amaroK faces, is that what is unintuitive for one, is quite inutitive for another, and it is tough to find a balance that is right for everyone. Much of what you cite here are features that other people quite like the way they are. I\'d be interested to hear what some others have to say about this.

Post edited by: oggb4mp3, at: 2005/10/27 00:33

why not have two playlist modes? One for both camps, with the ability to choose your mode in the options?

Keeping in mind that this line of conversation is mostly subjective, the playlist works fine from my perspective.

The only thing that I would change would be that double-clicking a song would append it to the playlist rather than playing the song. However, right-clicking and appending to the playlist is easy enough.

I like the UI just fine. There are some people who can\'t adapt to anything that it different than the way they have always had it before. You will never be able to please everybody. Thanks for adding the ability to create a blank Playlist. That is a good feature.

Gary

FWIW a lot has changed in regards to dynamic playlists and more will be changing.

I think that the dynamic playlist is wonderful!

A player for Windows that I liked was MusicMatch Jukebox, and I liked the feature of being able to have a generated playlist of music based on my listening habits and recommended tracks. That I can find that feature in software for Linux awesome.

To the folks who are developing amaroK, this is without a doubt the coolest player I have ever seen for Linux. Thanks for the hard work and for bring this to us.

You folks ROCK B)

Post edited by: johnnynospam, at: 2005/11/12 23:45