[Rhythmbox-devel] Re: [Usability]rhythmbox interface - playlists

[Josh Hoyt <josh_hoyt alumni hmc edu>]

Brainstorm about playlists:

A playlist is just like an album, in that it's a list of songs along
with an order. To me, it seems like the most intuitive interface is to
be able to create new albums and add a song to as many albums as you
want. The major drawback that I see to this is that there are albums
that you can change and albums that you can't, like CDs.

Then the sidebar can go away and library browsing is also playlist
browsing.

I like the idea of a play queue. The play queue makes sure that there's
no ambiguity about what's playing and what's next to play. You can add a
single song or an "album" to the queue, in order or randomized. The
queue can be called "the playlist" since what we've been calling
playlists are now called albums in my proposal. I'm not sure how the
interface should look, since four list boxes in one window (playlist,
artist, albums, track list) is not easy on the eyes.

The playlist would act like an album, except that once a song was
played, it would leave the album, unless repeat was turned on. that
seems kind of crack, an album where songs dissapear, but it would make
the interface more consistent, not needing a special place for the
queue.

Non-playlist related, it would be nice to be able to select songs by
other criteria, such as Least-Recently-Used or all songs that I gave 5
stars. Or all songs whose source file has a certain emblem in nautilus.

Hopefully, more signal than noise...

Josh