Re: [Muine] Groups revisited

[Lee Willis <lee leewillis co uk>]

On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 17:13 +0200, Jorn Baayen wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've been working a bit on creating a concrete groups and random
> playback proposal. The proposal can be found here: http://huizen.dds.nl/
> ~jbaayen/proposal.html.
> 
> Comments greatly appreciated.

Sorry, evolution sent the last mail before I finished :(  Full text
below!

OK - from the bottom :)

Playlist filling
----------------
The way I'd evisioned this working was as follows:

Addition of an "Autoplay" button on the main playlist window.

This would pop-open a list of defined "Autoplay groups". This would
have:
   (a) A list of previously defined groups (We can ship with some nice
defaults)
   (b) a method to tick one or more of these pre-defined groups
   (c) The ability to create a new group

Creating a new group would allow you to define criteria (Think of the
filter-creation type tool that you'd use for email) that the group would
select. Since the explicit filter control may get a bit complicated I
think we probably need a "wizard" approach to make it nice and simple.
This would allow, as examples:

- Music by Radiohead
- Music from 1980-1989
- Rock, or Prog-rock music
- Rock music from 1990-1999 by Radiohead

We should also allow criteria such as "newness" (Not played yet?),
popularness (Hardly ever played, sometimes played, often played), and
some form of ratings system so I could define such groups as:

- New dance music
- Often played trance music

Your mock-ups don't indicate that sort of level of control (You seem to
have limited it to genres??).

Once you play a group we need to look at the main UI a little in terms
of:

- How we title the playlist (Could get complicated to assemble a nice
string automatically from multiple criteria, I think we should just
allow a user to "name" their group, and use that
- The playlist length remaining could either be blank, or the time until
all music matching the criteria have been played
- Do we randomize everything at the start, and just fill the playlist,
or do we just show say, the next five items, and keep filling as time
goes on?
- What happens if some has selected an auto-play group, then a few songs
in, clicks "Add-album", and clicks "Queue"? Do we queue it to start when
the whole selection has expired, or just when the "x" items that are
shown in the playlist have finished?

OK - now that that's explained - how does it fit with the rest of your
proposal. Well, the play album, and play songs dialog would remain as
you proposed it, although the group restriction is now more powerful
since we have finer control over the critera. I don't really udnerstand
the "Group Editor" dialog, what is the user actually doing at this
point? Over-riding the criteria you set for the group by explicitly
adding/removing items? That sounds complicated. The group editor in my
view would take you back to the criteria "wizard" in edit mode so that
you can change the criteria.

How does all of this address the use cases?

    1.  The user wants to play random songs
The user would hit "Auto-play", tick the "All music" pre-defined group,
and hit play.

     2. The user wants to play random albums
The user would hit "Auto-play", tick the "All music" pre-defined group,
and hit play. Is this different from (1)? Do people actually
differentiate between songs from albums, and songs not from albums?

     3. The user wants to play random songs of a certain kind
The user would hit "Auto-play", tick one, or more of the groups and hit
play. If a group didn't exist then he'd click on "New group", select the
criteria, input a group title, and click "Add". The group would appear
in the group-list, ticked, and he'd hit "Play".

     4. The user wants to play random albums of a certain kind
Same as 3. See comments on (2)

     5. The user wants to see all single songs, recently added songs,
        never played songs, most popular songs, etc
Hmm - not really covered by my comments, although maybe an extra button
in the auto-play dialog that was "View music", that just displayed the
music matched by the critera?

     6. The user wants to browse music by genre
Not covered, but see comments on (5)

     7. The user wants to randomize the current playlist
We need to add a random item just below shuffle to the main menu, not
covered explicitly by my comments, but sort of covered since "auto-play"
would add the tracks randomly when it is used to add music.

     8. The user wants to be able to manually categorise their music
Not sure I actually understand this?. Perhaps we should auto-generate an
auto-play group for every genre that the user's collection contains?
Would that cover it?
Lee
-- 
Lee Willis <lee leewillis co uk>