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KDE seems to be moving towards more and more towards a single backend that provides data to multiple applications, with the applications figuring out what specific information they want to display. We have akonadi for pim information and, soon, financial information. Nepomuk is providing shared metadata (and much more).

However, there is one type of information that is still very fragmented but I think would benefit from this: media playlists. Currently, every music, video, and picture application has to make its own playlist system, and playlists cannot be shared between applications. This means all the work you do making, for example, your Amarok playlists will be useless when you are using Juk or, after this year's GSOC, the plasma media center interface.

I think this is a very inefficient way of doing things. It would be much better if KDE provided a single playlist system that could then be used by any application. This means that if you make a playlist in one application, it would automatically be available to all others. This would have to include dynamic and biased playlists like Amarok. I am not sure the best way to go about this, but I am leaning towards kio. The advantage of kio is that you can navigate the playlists like folders, allowing you to access them right from within dolphin. It also helps with any application that does not support the playlist system, you can just point it at the kio slave and use those files. This is especially true of non-kde apps, if they ever get around to finishing the kio-fuse.

It might also be possible to use akonadi, which I think works through kio anyway, but this might require too big of a dependency for applications like Amarok. As I stated before, kde financial applications are already switching to akonadi, so it can be used for things other than pim. This might also make it easier to write new playlist provider, i.e. biased playlists.

No Amarok <-> plasma media center interface?

The main thing, I hoped about PMCI is that it would work side by side with Amarok. same music library, same controls, so when you want to do something with library management, you just switch to Amarok, when working with text processor, simply sue active corners (like now playing plasmid but with many new cool features)

However shouldn't such job be done by phonon (+ dbus)?

p.s. Of course a kio for non this framework apps would be great, but if problem like viewtopic.php?f=83&t=62597 wont be solved it be useless

I was under the impressions phonon was just a simple way to play and record audio and video, I haven't heard anything about it supporting playlists.

I like this idea very much.

For one thing I'd love to feel I had the freedom to switch music players without loss. Perhaps there could be some thought put into album art management also? ATM each application seems to manage that separately also.

In osx the file selection dialog integrates with appplications like itunes and iphoto so you can see your collections in a consistent way outside the application that created them. Of course this only works for privelidged apps in OSX. The KDE way would not be so closed.