It would be nice to have Shuffle buttons and a Repeat toggle on the playlist area somewhere.  Kind of a pain to look through menus to find what mode you are in and change it.

Yeah, we're aware of this problem. These modes definitely need some visual feedback in the user interface.

We'll probably remedy this in one of the upcoming releases.

Perhaps some of the playlist management  buttons like save, export and layout could be moved to the menus to make room for the new buttons

+1 for a shuffle button

Sorry to say it but it's a real pain to navigate in the menu.
Maybe I'm the only one on earth but most of the time I'm with the full collection in the playlist, shuffle mode enabled. Then when a song part of an album I feel like listening plays I switch shuffle off to re-enable it later when I'm done with the album. Such a cycle happens many times a day and every single time I'm cursing the guy who thought a shuffle button was useless

I really like amarok and I'm very grateful to the team but please, had a shuffle button somewhere...
(bottom of playlist or above the track progress? there's a huge blank space between the (IMHO) not-so-useful add position marker button and the volume control)

@julien
Wouldn't it be easier to enable dynamic playlist, instead of loading the whole collection into a playlist?
So you can switch it on/off through the playlist browser.

Greetings
m0nk

There seems to be some disconnect here.

julien wrote:Maybe I'm the only one on earth but most of the time I'm with the full collection in the playlist, shuffle mode enabled. Then when a song part of an album I feel like listening plays I switch shuffle off to re-enable it later when I'm done with the album.

I'm not seeing a shuffle option on the menu or otherwise in Amarok 2.

Random play is a different beast that will jump to random tracks/albums in your playlist.

Shuffle re-orders the tracks in your playlist so it will play through in the order the tracks are listed, assuming random play is turned off.

Personally I much prefer shuffle to random play for static playlists and am a +1 for having the option to add a shuffle button to the playlist toolbar.

For random play I prefer dynamic playlists, but I do see how it would be considered desirable to have the option to add a toggle button for the random play to the toolbar as well.

As for adding your entire collection to a static playlist, that is a topic of it's own that has been discussed multiple times before.

Later, Seeker

@Dieter
Thanks for the follow up.
Maybe I'm not using the tool well but in my case when I use the dynamic random playlist it populates the playlist randomly, song by song, thus the playlist really is nothing more than a random list of individual songs. Works well for a pure random play but the idea here is a little bit different.
I might be wrong but when using any kind of iTunes like media library oriented player I think most of the people use the default artists/albums sorting.
Thus when I push the "shuffle" (or "random play" if you like ) button it doesn't change the sorting or anything, it just plays a random song rather than the next one in the album.
Being used to that behavior what happens to me often is that a random song plays, I'm like "ages since I last listened to this, the album was pretty cool so let's stay of this for now" so I turn random play off and listen to the original song's album sequentially.
With that in mind the problem with using a dynamic playlist is that when I feel like going sequential to listen to that album I need to search for it, put it in the playlist and then only can I enjoy the tracks.
Maybe Amarok was not meant to be used that way from the beginning but I don't think I'm the only one who got used to have a shuffle button one click away.

edit: spending more time in the dynamic random mode I guess it's not such a big deal after all: when I feel like going sequential I can just drag n drop the album from the widget in the zone in the middle (provided the "Albums" widget is used). I guess I'll stick with that usage for now. Thanks for the suggestion.

@seeker5528
If you've read that far I guess you understand we have different ways to use Amarok

Finally I am certainly not a UI engineer but being used to rearrange stuff to maximize useful space (like, putting buttons aside the address bar in firefox to maximize the page space) I can't help but think "what a waste of precious pixels" when I see the emptiness above the track progress.
Don't know the complexity behind it but what about having a "customize" option where the user would drag n drop buttons in this space? (just like in firefox for instance)

Cheers,
Julien