Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Some suggestions

[Gisli Ottarsson <gisli ottarsson mscsoftware com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 04:01, Joshua Haberman wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 17:46, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 19:28, Gisli Ottarsson wrote:
> > >  1) It would be nice to be able to queue up songs without
> > >     having to build a play-list.  Drag songs into the queue
> > >     where they wait their turn.  Once played they simply fall
> > >     off the queue.  Great for parties where everyone is a DJ.
> > >     Perhaps the vertical "Source" area could be tabbed with
> > >     "Queue" area in another tab.
> > 
> > This is what playlists *should* be.  We just have to unbreak them.  This
> > will happen right after the database reworking.
> 
> I feel like these are different concepts.  Playlists are an ordered
> subset of the library.  You can start anywhere in the list, and once a
> song is done it moves to the next one.  A queue would be different:
> 
> * if nothing is currently playing, you should be able to drag a song to
> the queue to start playing only that song.  Once that song is finished,
> RB stops playing again.
> * once a song in the queue has been played, it should disappear from the
> queue.  You would never want this to happen for a playlist.
> 
> It seems reasonable that the queue could be a new source that has a
> similar implementation to playlists, with these two major differences.

Exactly right.  Once a song is played it is deleted from the queue,
which never happens in a playlist.  Also, Shuffle does not make sense
in a queue.  More like FIFO, although manual reordering would be a
handy feature.    

Another difference might be that a song could appear multiple times in
a queue, which is probably not true for a playlist.

The UI is another area of difference, because I think one would want to
see a queue displayed alongside the library as opposed to *switching*
between the display of library and playlist sources. This is why I
thought the "Source" area could double as the queue display, perhaps
similar to multiple items are accommodated in the Mozilla sidebar.  The
display would be truncated to just the Title.  I think this would be
better than having Queue as just another source item.

Gisli