[Muine] Groups and the main UI

[Jorn Baayen <jorn nl linux org>]

Hi,

Muine is currently missing random playback & grouping features. I had
the following idea to solve this:

We allow the user to group music together. Manually, and we could also
automatically generate groups based on genre information (or create
groups for "orphan" songs (ie no album), "never played", etc). We then
allow the user to select multiple groups to be played back from. Muine
will then make sure that there are always, say, 10 songs left to be
played in the playlist (so that the user can see what is played next,
and remove any songs he/she isn't feeling like hearing right now). These
songs will be randomly chosen from the selected groups. 

We can integrate some nifty statistics here, to make the random song
picking code favour songs that are played more manually, and favour
songs that are skipped or whatever less.

There is one other idea regarding random playback that I find very
interesting, but that does not directly fit into this model: Playing
random albums, like the iPod apparently does. 

The other problem is how to integrate this into the main UI. I did some
glading, but I am not happy with the result - it looks messy:
http://nl.linux.org/~jorn/Muine/groups.png

Any help and discussion on this subject would be most welcome!

Thanks,

Jorn