(apologies for the long essay! It needs discussing.)

I (/Amarokkers in general) have conflicting usability desires for the playlist. It should be easy to play music by double-clicking etc. etc.; it should be easy to avoid editing fields by accident; it should be easy to edit some fields. ("fields" being album, artist, rating, etc., depending what your playlist layout includes)

Personally, I mount my music read-only for Amarok, because I only want to change the tags with Easytag, and because I don't want, by accident (or Amarok bug!), to edit the tags in Amarok. On the other hand, I am personally fine with using Amarok to manage/change its own information such as rating and play-count (It's not like there's any other program I could change it from, haha).

If you have different personal preferences than I do, then it's super important that you share them here, so we can see what might work well for everyone!

My Issue (A) : The tag-editing feature makes the playlist harder to use as a playlist (even when the mp3s are read-only and thus not actually editable!) -- especially for new users, see later.

- If you click on a track that's already selected (not to be confused with currently-playing, even though these two selections look rather similar), you go into a mode where that track is selected. In this mode:
-- double-clicking on the edit-selected song does *not* "rescue" you by starting to play the song, even though double-clicking on a song in the playlist normally starts to play the song
-- sometimes, even hitting "space" to pause/play the currently-playing song doesn't work anymore. (To be precise, this happens if you click again in the selected song, thus selecting one of the text-fields -- and this clicking is something you're rather likely to do if you're confused.)
-- Luckily, hitting "escape" or clicking on a different song escape from this mode. However, for a nervous person unfamiliar with Amarok and/or trying to start music at a precise time, this is rather disorienting.

In particular:
Use case 1:
I would choreograph a dance, to a piece of music on my computer, and then show it to others for critique. So I need someone else to start the music for me. She got confused by Amarok doing the above edit-selection-thing to her and not starting to play. (She's used to iTunes, she said -- but I've basically never used iTunes, so I'm not sure what the comparison is.) I would LOOOOVE to have a chance of converting people like this to Amarok and would rather they not have a bad first experience :)

Use case 2:
Like the above, but I tell her a particular point in the dance at which she needs to start the music. This makes it particularly important to get the timing right, not to be distracted by this Amarok-interface-feature.

I myself have been bitten by this interface feature too. (Some of this experience was with Amarok 1.4, but as far as I can tell, Amarok 2.2+ has nearly exactly the same editing-interface and definitely has the same issues. I groaned when it made a comeback in amarok2 :))


My Issue (B) : What if the rating-editing in the playlist was easier to use?

- I rate music with the five-star (0-10) system; rating is one of the fields I display in my playlist. The playlist is nicer for setting rating than the context-box in "current track" mode, because the playlist lets you set the rating on tracks that aren't currently playing (and because I'd rather not use the context/current-track box at all). However, the playlist is less nice because
-- I have to first click on the track I want to change, and then pause for a long enough moment that it doesn't become a double-click -- and change the currently playing song and lose the position in the previous song and sound bad!, and only then, click again to make it into an edit-selection. (I think I read from some usability expert that "waiting" as a user input mechanism is really cognitively inefficient. Anyway, it is for me.)
-- Then, when editably-selected, the stars are shifted (at least for me) a bit (a whole star-width) off to the side of where they were when it wasn't editably-selected. (Maybe this is simply a bug that can be fixed?)
-- Then I click on the correct star-amount that I want.
-- Then I make a fourth click somewhere else to deselect.
(There's an even slower way to set rating, by right-clicking, Edit Track Details, Statistics, and click on the tiny-sized stars in that tab, and then Save & Close. Those stars should be as big as stars in other places -- there's no shortage of space in that dialog!)

My Conclusion (C) :

For my own use, what I think I want is
- no selected-mode at all; no editing! (could this be a preference? although an improved-interface-for-all would be even better)
- a single click on the stars in the playlist (no selecting needed) could change the rating! (Although I'm afraid I could accidentally destroy some of my ratings, or a friend who didn't know that field was special could, so I'm not sure. Maybe an undo feature??? A different "context"-thing than the current "current track" one might suffice for my needs too..)

Please discuss, since I don't have a perfect answer (and in order to hear from people who do happily use the metadata-editing features).