valoriez wrote:Well, if they are all labelled the same and you have done track numbers, you can just sort by label and track number (or album and track number) in the playlist. Then if you want random, you can do "random albums".

How do you create a playlist of random albums as opposed to random tracks? (Enabling playlists as explicit members of other playlists would make that easy.) I don't want to randomize the sequence of tracks within an album as a side effect of randomizing albums.

More generally, the facilities of Dynamic Playlists are quite mysterious to me. I don't understand a number of the terms on the screens and I haven't found any explanations of them. For instance, the first choice is the numbers for Previous and Upcoming -- but what do those mean? And under Proportional Bias there's something about Echo Nest Similar Artists. What is that all about? If I use Proportional Bias to select a particular composer for 50% of a playlist, how is the other 50% generated? What is the universe from which the elements of a dynamic playlist are selected?

By the way, I did provide a screenshot of the blue dots that I asked about in another thread.

The APG Editor has facilities for selecting sets -- but I don't see anything in it for controlling the sequence of items within a set. What am I missing? How is the sequence determined?

APG isn't going to work for what you want, IMO, although I'm far from an expert. You can read more about the APG here: http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/Manual/A ... tGenerator

Dynamic Playlists are all about random tracks from various "biases" or filters. Previous and upcoming are just that - how many track will appear above the track playing in the playlist, and how many below. Echo Nest and Last.fm both have various mean of assigning "similar artists" -- play with them, and see what you like. A 50% bias will be following half the time, and the rest will be random. You can have multiple biases, although stacking too many of them gives you less and less of your collection from which to pull. More about the Dynamic Playlists: http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/Manual/A ... cPlaylists

I have a very big classical and non-classical collection of music and Amarok is certainly my all-time favorite player. Specially useful for a classical maniac is the ease that hierarchies are controlled in the media sources window and the playlist.

The only really annoying problem I have with Amarok is that it NO LONGER has the capacity of displaying the "composer" tag in either the playlist environment or the OSD. The frustrating thing is that previous releases of Amarok did! A sad consequence of this is that there is no way of looking-up the composer of a determined track other than going to the "edit track details"-->"Tags" tab in the playlist! Even the neat scripts to improve the OSD cannot display the composer tag, even though they can do so for other less important (in my opinion) tags like "bitrate" or "genre". I also don't care for album covers and there is no way of getting rid of the empty jewel case icon of every album entry in my playlists.

I think Amarok is still the best thing out there, I'd love for it to recover the ample configurability of its previous versions.

(All my classical is tagged with "composer" as, well... composer, "artist" is the interpreter and "album" contains a shorthand for the type of work "Sin"=symphony "Cua"=quartet... it contains the key, the opus (or general catalogue nuuber) and the initial of the interpreter whenever I have several recordings of the same work.)

The composer tag is most definitely still available in the playlist, and the display of album cover can likewise be disabled.

See the composer icon at the top, and the "show cover" checkbox.

Screenshot from the latest release of Amarok.

Sentynel wrote:The composer tag is most definitely still available in the playlist, and the display of album cover can likewise be disabled.

See the composer icon at the top, and the "show cover" checkbox.

Screenshot from the latest release of Amarok.

I would certainly be blushed and be feeling like a fool if I weren't so happy you showed me this. I, unfortunately, wasn't wrong about the OSD...

Thanks.

There would be also the support of further tags. In the vorbis tags (right name?) in ogg vorbis and flac files you can define custom tags. VIOLIN, PIANO etc Supported by foorbar2k or exfalso. This is really great to search for your favourite piano player.

Well I guess mp3s dont have that capability, but why orientating at the worst....

Cheers

PS: Gapless not working, is it? (that would really be my priority...)

nablasquared wrote:PS: Gapless not working, is it? (that would really be my priority...)

Gapless works in the current development version of the Phonon GStreamer backend at least, but I'm not sure if this has made it to release yet.

Maaya Sakamoto is a Japanese singer who used to work with composer Yoko Kanno. If I want to listen to Yoko Kanno music, I might play one of the songs released under a Maaya Sakamoto album, but would be unable to use the context browser to look at "Favorite Songs by Composer[Yoko Kanno]" or "Other Albums by Composer[Yoko Kanno]". This seems a reasonable thing for a "Context" bar to do.

It would be great if someone would consider making a config file for the context browser which would allow a large amount of customization, e.g. "Favorite Tracks by Composer" or "Other Albums With This Composer". It should be a simple thing to do really; all one needs are functions for "Favorite Tracks by [*Arbitrary* Field]" and another function for "Other Albums by [*Arbitrary* Field]", and the file could be a simple linebreak-delimited list like:
r4 3ds
currently-playing
favorite-tracks-by-performer
favorite-tracks-by-composer
favorite-tracks-by-lyricist
albums-by-artist
albums-by-composer

I guess you would use the rating to define a "Favorite", right? So why not make a Dynamic playlist where you combine exactly that, using the logical "AND"?

Sentynel wrote:

nablasquared wrote:PS: Gapless not working, is it? (that would really be my priority...)

Gapless works in the current development version of the Phonon GStreamer backend at least, but I'm not sure if this has made it to release yet.

That's finally some great news, thanks! I'd be happy to try that out.
Which version are you talking about?

ermonnezza wrote:That's finally some great news, thanks! I'd be happy to try that out.
Which version are you talking about?

http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=phonon-gstre ... &a=summary
Check the code out from there and build it (you'll need Phonon from git as well).