Used to be my player when attached displayed above the "local collection" in "local music" but today it is below and this is a bit of a problem because if my collection is expanded to display the listing then when the player is attached I can't see that it was recognized and is being displayed without collapsing the listing or paging to the end.

This appears to be because of the sorting caret to the right of artist/year album - was there a change? as before it didn't affect both the sorting of the collections and the albums within, just albums (of course I could be mismembering)

I'm running a git amarok-2.3.1.60svn20100611-33.2.x86_64 under kde4.5beta2

Yeah, I recently made the collections sorted by their names. I can see the problem you are seeing. There are many users who want the collection to be expanded all the time (Amarok tries to do this, but doesn't always do a good job of it); so I'm thinking we could keep the sorting, but make the local collection always listed at the bottom. Would that help? Or do you have some other suggestions?

That works(ed) for me, but if there's multiple devices/collections (3 or more) should there be a click'able control (icons or single line) at the top as a switcher of sorts? Or maybe that's an extreme case.

some quick thoughts:
-there should be a way to collapse a given collection after some artist/albums have been expanded, once expanded they seem to stay that way unless you do a search or manual close of the artits/albums

-can't remember but did actual name of the player have display? Anywhere Amarok, Dolphin, device notifier?

Switcher for what?

You can click on the collection item itself to expand/collapse it. Unless you have enabled the unified view then everything from all available collections would be mixed together in one big tree.

Can't say I fully understood your last question.

switcher for devices - if any device/collection is expanded then whatever is below isn't visible

try again
- when I expand an artist(s) in the collection so a list of all their albums display and then expand albums there's no way (I can see) to fully collapse the collection listing again so it's fully collapsed and only showing artists (not albums and/or tracks), wish this to keep the scrolling length shorter.
- is there any way to display the device's actual name like "Sansa E270" instead of "volume (vfat)"

Then that switcher would be inconvient anytime you want to look at anything under what was expanded.

I think what you meant by "fully collapsed" is actually collapsing the collection tree to the first level. What I meant by "fully collapsed" is when only the root/collection item is visible. That can be toggled on the collection item itself (it is the level above all the artists). So if you have 5 devices, when all are fully collapsed there are 5 items in the view, one for each device.

I'm not exacly sure what names are used for display but I think it's the partition label, which is set when it's formatted and can probably be set by some other programs.

I was thinking a sticky "switcher" that always stayed on top showing what devices/collections were available

then how would I collapse the collection tree to the first level (only artists showing) after I've expanded parts of the tree, it appears to me that once expanded those parts stay that way even if I root collapse the collection and then open it again or I sort it (sorting worked in the 1.x series).

Well, maybe the sticky concept can be useful. Might need to think about how to best implement that sort of thing.

You can't set the collpse level, and yes, the expand state is retained even if the root is collpased/expanded. I prefer it that way. What _can_ reset the expand states though is when you perform filtering.

What do you mean sorting doesn't work?

re: "sorting doesn't work", I mean that in the 1.x series, if I sorted my collection it collapsed the tree to the first level, not so the 2.x series

Filtering only collapses that which was expanded, but than leaves expanded the filtered results - of course if I do a bogus search like "ddd" then clear the search field then I've collapsed the tree as I had been looking for a way to do.

Any thought to a button to collapse the tree to first level?

as to the sticky concept - how do other players address it? is it worth the effort?

Well, sorting still works. If it used to collapse the tree then it was a side effect and probably wasn't intended.

The filtered results should be expanded, that's what it should do.

I've seen an example (Picard) where if you right click on the expand/collapse arrow, the context menu has actions to "collapse everything" and "expand everything". Having something like that would let you do what you want but I'm not so sure about including the latter because the average collection would be large enough to make that operation take a very long time.

There isn't really a suitable place for a button; I think in the context menu is probably better.

I don't know what other players do, and since I'm not terribly excited about this idea it's not worth it for me.