As there's no smart playlists in Amarok 2 yet, I tried to simulate these in Amarok 2.

I had several smart playlists in Amarok 1.4, and they were based on artists only. I tried doing the same with dynamic playlists in Amarok 2, but I ran into the problem that when I added 5 artists into the playlist, I have to choose percentages for every one of them and assure that the total will be 100%, because otherwise the leftover percentage will be filled with random artists from the collection.

It would help a lot if there was an option meaning that "the whole playlist is limited to only these criterias". It would mean that the playlist really is divided amongst these items, so that the items' percentages would sum up to 100%, and recalculated when more parameters are added.

Actually, it doesn't make much sense to let the percentages to sum up more than 100%, because the proportional item should mean "what portion of the playlist should match the criteria" - if I have 2 items with 100% there, it actually that both of them weight 50%, right?

Any thoughts on this?

Not a usability issue in anyone's opinion? It was to me when I started porting my Amarok 1.4 playlists to Amarok 2.

Any thought at all?

atrox wrote:Not a usability issue in anyone's opinion?

Not having the option to append never played tracks to the playlist is the only thing keeping me from switching to Amarok 2 permanently in my Debian distribution, which is my primary distribution. I have Amarok 2 in my Ubuntu installation so I can keep tabs on it.

Later, Seeker

Yeah, well.. the question was actually about the topic (my proposal), ie. to agitate thinking about it or smth

atrox wrote:Yeah, well.. the question was actually about the topic (my proposal), ie. to agitate thinking about it or smth

And I think those were good questions.

It's hard to think of one area of the playlist stuff without thinking of others, and you did mention smart playlists in your initial post.

On further review I do see now I can tell it to populate the list with tracks that have less than 1 play, which does serve my need, but I would rather have a static list with all the never played tracks in it.

So here is something else for the developers to think about.

Would it be better instead of have 'Dynamic Playlists' and 'My Playlists' to have 'Current Playlist' or 'Generated Playlists' and 'Saved Playlists' and have the option to use the bias resolver to populate the list always available, whether dynamic mode is enabled or not?

So instead of the On/Off button you would have a 'Dynamic/Static' button.

Repopulate would never be greyed out.

In addition to 'Proportional Bias' and 'Fuzzy Bias' have a third set of static options that become selectable if dynamic mode is disabled, allowing to use the bias resolver to generate a static playlist based on the number of tracks you want to populate it with or the amount of time you want it to play.

Also, how about having an option for least played tracks that is percentage based,  so I can tell the resolver I want 10% of the playlist to be made up of songs from the least played 25% of the collection.

Thinking more about this....

"It would help a lot if there was an option meaning that "the whole playlist is limited to only these criterias". It would mean that the playlist really is divided amongst these items, so that the items' percentages would sum up to 100%, and recalculated when more parameters are added."

The matching criteria are not all mutually exclusive, you could have 100% rock, 100% tracks with less than 5 plays, 100% Jimi Hendrix, and not be over 100%, so I'm not sure what your thinking is when you say ' the items' percentages would sum up to 100%'.

If you were thinking something like... Currently you have to individually create a matching criteria for each artist, with an individual percentage for each artist, it might instead be made so you can choose to match by artist, then select multiple artists and have the percentage apply to the group of artists instead of each individual artists. I might agree with that.

With or without the option to limit the results to specified criteria, I would assume if mutually exclusive items total up to more than 100% the bias resolver does or will be made to fall back to some kind of proportional weighting mechanism that scales the results accordingly.

Later, Seeker

seeker5528 wrote:Thinking more about this....

"It would help a lot if there was an option meaning that "the whole playlist is limited to only these criterias". It would mean that the playlist really is divided amongst these items, so that the items' percentages would sum up to 100%, and recalculated when more parameters are added."

The matching criteria are not all mutually exclusive, you could have 100% rock, 100% tracks with less than 5 plays, 100% Jimi Hendrix, and not be over 100%, so I'm not sure what your thinking is when you say ' the items' percentages would sum up to 100%'.

If you were thinking something like... Currently you have to individually create a matching criteria for each artist, with an individual percentage for each artist, it might instead be made so you can choose to match by artist, then select multiple artists and have the percentage apply to the group of artists instead of each individual artists. I might agree with that.

My point is that in case of your example where I have 100% of this, 100% of that, and let's say 50% (instead of 100%) of Jimi Hendrix, I can't actually understand what is my playlist (100% of it) made of - do I have to apply the 3 percentages in order or are these the proportions of my playlist. If the latter is the case, is 100% of my playlist 100%+100%+50%? It's very-very confusing, instead of being intuitive.

But my personal way of using smart playlist is, that I just want to listen to a certain set of artists from my collection. I've filtered them out by hand (there might my smth like 30 artists in some playlists) and put all of them into a smart playlist. The playlist would then give any song of any artist in the set and that's what I really want. It also means that an artist that has more songs in my playlist, is played more, and to my mind that's fair too.
If I put this goal into Amarok 2 context, I'm a bit confused about what should I set the percentages of the individual artists to? I don't actually want to use any percentages, because if I let them all use the same percentages, an artist with 2 tracks would be played as often as an artist with 100 tracks.. or not?

seeker5528 wrote:With or without the option to limit the results to specified criteria, I would assume if mutually exclusive items total up to more than 100% the bias resolver does or will be made to fall back to some kind of proportional weighting mechanism that scales the results accordingly.

Yes, well.. we could assume it, but we cannot be sure as (again), I don't fully understand the ideas of the percentages, which leads us to the same old question about how exactly "proportional weighting mechanism scales the results accordingly" - if the percentages are recalculated (to sum up to 100%?), then why to let user specify these initial values anway?

And sorry about mentioning 'percentage' at least 5 times in every sentence

atrox wrote:Yes, well.. we could assume it, but we cannot be sure as (again), I don't fully understand the ideas of the percentages, which leads us to the same old question about how exactly "proportional weighting mechanism scales the results accordingly" - if the percentages are recalculated (to sum up to 100%?), then why to let user specify these initial values anway?

I don't think I fully understand it either, but after reading this other blog post, it makes a little more sense to me.

If you think of a bias in real life, this is your tendency to choose one thing over another. If you have a strong bias it pushes out other choices, but even with a strong bias other factors may push you towards  something you are biased against.

The bias resolver takes the criteria and percentages you give it and does the best it can with them. The percentage (I think) is not a literal representation, I could be wrong though because the more I think about it.....

I can see the possibilities that, if these are not relative to each other, but instead a simple 'a track with this criteria is this percent more likely to be played than a track without':

A: If nothing is defined as 100% there might still be some tracks coming up that don't match any of the defined criteria.

B: Defining one criteria as 100%, might keep something that doesn't match, but matches another defined criteria from playing.

And the more I think about it the more I think this is the way it should work, which then takes you back to being very desirable to have an option to only include tracks that match one of the defined criteria.

And personally I would still like to have an option to use the bias resolver to build a static playlist.

Later, Seeker

Yes, well.. I suspect that the developers' ideas about the new playlist weren't so obscure, so I really wish some of them would comment anything on the topic

I want to make a dyn. playlist that contains 100% unrated songs..
That's what need to be developed too..

pestsov wrote:I want to make a dyn. playlist that contains 100% unrated songs..
That's what need to be developed too..

If you choose rating, equal to, leave the stars empty, Slide the % slider to 100%, does this not work for you?

Later, Seeker