Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Source groups

["William Jon McCann" <mccann jhu edu>]

Hi,

On 3/5/07, James Doc Livingston <doclivingston gmail com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 01:58 +0200, Mika Wahlroos wrote:
> > I do. Perhaps not so much directly, but indirectly. Traditionally, when
> > I create a new playlist it appears at the end of the group. It's obvious
> > where it goes, and I can easily find it when filling it with tracks from
> > the library. At least for me it's quite common to do that a lot when
> > creating a playlist, so having the playlist easily locatable is perhaps
> > even more important at that point than in other situations.
>
> Having it move itself once you entered a name for the playlist would be
> a bit disconcerting. I've just noticed an oddity, it only seems to
> alphabetise the playlists on startup.

I don't think the moving is a big deal because the selection & focus
don't change.

I'm not sure what you mean by only on startup.  The model should keep
the items sorted based on the criteria we use in the comparison
function.  Seems to work here.

> > I guess it doesn't matter so much, but unless there's a seriously high
> > number of playlists, I fail to see how alphabetical listing would make
> > finding a playlist significantly easier than having them in a random
> > order would.
>
> If you do have such a large number of playlists, having better
> organisation method would probably be useful. Such as the sometimes
> requested "playlist folders".

Once we start talking about "organisation" it is a pretty slippery
slope to offering a Playlist Manager.  I'm sure there are people that
think that would be a good thing.  Then again there other music
players available that target this audience.

In another message someone said that they like to put the playlists
they use most often at the top of the list.  The conclusion was that
automatic sorting is incompatible with this and that all users should
be required to keep their playlists organized.  That seems to be a
really bad solution to me.  A possibly better solution is to keep a
play count on each playlist and have a section at the top of the
playlist group for the 5-sigma most played playlists.  You'd have to
have some visual way to distinguish them from the other alphabetically
sorted ones so that you don't lose the ability to quickly scan (ie.
dictionary / binary search) them.  We could either color code them or
put a horizontal separator between them and the rest.

Regarding folders, I'm not sure what folders offer that just using the
playlist name doesn't and making the source list more hierarchical may
not be the best.

> For a relatively small number of playlists, it probably doesn't make
> such of a difference, as you say.
>
>
> > Please correct me if there's actual evidence to the
> > contrary, because mine is just a gut feeling. On the other hand, being
> > able to order the items in the list so that they make sense in some
> > other, more personal way would seem to make finding things on the list easy.
>
> I don't really have enough playlists myself to be affected by it, but it
> sounds like people with a reasonable number of playlists find manual
> sorting useful.

I'm not sure we have enough information to say this.  I think there is
a heck of a lot  more evidence that people with a huge number of
playlists specifically don't want to have to manually sort them.  I
think this is one reason why iTunes automatically sorts them.  In many
cases I think people find a way to group things semantically anyway.
For example: "Electro breakdance party March" "Electro breakdance
party Sep" "Funk - Playlist 1" "Funk - Playlist 2" etc.  People really
do grok alphabetically sorting and are really intuitively good at
searching and scanning things that are obviously in alphabetically
order.  Manually ordering on the other hand requires you to retain
knowledge of where you put it.  This is something that most people are
pretty bad at in general.  And we shouldn't assume that they care to
remember how they ordered their playlists.

Jon