Hey

I sent this idea to the Amarok developers but just to make it more part of the community here you go.

The story goes like this. A friend of mine came home to check out my music collection managed by Amarok. He loved the player and thought that it was really cool (me too). As he searched through the songs he gave no time for "real" listening, instead he was just contempt with just few seconds as previews as he rushed through the collection. This is not very nice, he didn't really listen to the songs because there was not such a way of previewing them.

And it is the same for ourselves, when we borrow a new cd or get someone else's collection to check.

A plugin like preview can be developed to help with this. It can help you in a situation like mine and many others.

I though of two options

1. A button called preview mode will turn the whole Amarok collection into preview songs ranging from 30 seconds top 1 minute, crossfading into the next song eliminating the need for you to be stuck on the screen selecting song by song what you want to preview.
2. Or, it could be that there was a "Preview Queue" list where one can send all the songs you would like to preview with the same properties that option 1 has. The interface could be similar to the one we already have in 1.4 with the device transfer section

Give me your input and contact some Amarok developer to make it real

Thanks

If you want each song to be played x seconds then there's a script to do this. (search kde-apps)
Run it, and only the first x seconds of each song in the playlist will be played. Is this what you want?

Cheers.

I like the idea of a preview feature.
To make this usefull i would expect a konfiguration option to send its output to a different sound device.
This could be a second soundcard or the analog output of the sound card. (default device is mapped to to spdif)
Using a Headphone would allow to pre listen to tracks before adding them to the playlist.

Greetz