Thursday, August 20. 2009Inline metadata editing in the playlist
One of the features from Amarok 1 that has so far been missing from Amarok 2, is the ability to edit track metadata directly in the playlist. While it might sound surprising that such a seemingly simple and oft requested feature should take so long to implement, the extremely flexible nature of the Amarok 2 playlist made it quite tricky to get right.
Recently I decided to have a go at it, and after a few false starts, I think I finally finally made it work. So as of today, cliking on an already selected item in the playlist makes it go into "edit mode" where (some of) the visible fields can be edited (subject to a few rules about which pieces of metadata it makes sense to manually edit). The hard part here was to generate editors that fits whatever layout the playlist is setup to use. Below are screenshots of inline editing with 2 different layouts. The look of the edit boxes could possibly do with a little tweaking, but the functionality is pretty solid.   As the attentive reader will note, this also allows changing track ratings directly in the playlist. Look for this to arrive in an Amarok 2.2 near you. Trackbacks
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looking at the git commits and blogs like this, i thin 2.2 is really going to rock
Thanks a lot for implementing this.
This fixes bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188551 Is it now also possible changing the rating for a selection of multiple tracks? I found this to be a quite handy feature back in 1.4 times. Regards, Elias P.
I was too slow - mamarok already replied in the bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188551#c10
When is 2.2 expected to be released?!
It's looked so incredible. They've been advertising it since they opened the feature floodgates once 2.1 was released!
That's Great, It's always such a hassle in different music players to have open a whole new window for each song when you want edit meta data.
Good job everybody who is working on Amarok, and keep up the good work!
Ooh.
Perhaps make a custom text input frame (or just draw it frameless?). The Oxygen one seems a little fat, and since you're not using the theme for the widgets in that area anyway...
Thank you so much for implementing this!
I started writing some code for this a few months back but got stuck, plus I didn't know whether the way I was doing it was sensible or not. I look forward to reading your code to see how it was done!
I also prefer that this is optional.
If posible make an option, if not make an IFDEF state, so we can diable this.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here (so I don't mean this as a whinge, just putting the other side) but I tend to find in-line editing of play-list metadata annoying. Accidentally editing details is a pain. More frequently though I simply find myself accidentally activating "edit mode" and having to carefully select tracks to avoid killing my metadata.
If I want to edit track details efficiently then the main thing is to have a really good dialogue for doing so. How about a metadata panelview widget so that all of the metadata for a track can be displayed and edited for the selected track(s) without complicating the interaction with the playlist which I think is best kept as a simply for playlist-stuff: add remove, move tracks, right-click if you need to do anything else. After all how often do you edit the metadata for a given track? Perhaps once, usually not even that. It is a special operation that should not get mixed up with the normal use of moving tracks around in a playlist. OK I said it wasn't a whinge and was just my personal opinion but I got quite vociferous by the end ;¬) It is only my (non-expert) opinion but I think the overall human-interface implications of adding such a feature are worth considering. p.s. perhaps a simple solution that might please everyone would be to have "edit mode"/"edit inline" as a right-click menu option and have a checkbox in the settings for "clicking selected items in playlist activates edit-mode". But I still think no edit mode is better.
"If I want to edit track details efficiently then the main thing is to have a really good dialogue for doing so."
Of course there is a dialog interface for editing metadata. It has been there since 1.x days. The point of this post is that you can also edit the tags inline in 2.2, which I find rather nice because it looks like one can edit tags for whole albums with one click.
"which I find rather nice because it looks like one can edit tags for whole albums with one click"
You can edit a group of tracks with the dialogue. With a metadata widget such as I was talking about you could also edit data for the selected track(s) in a single click.
Also, thanks for Amarok. Loving the 2.2 trunk (packages from arch and suse).
Cool!
Now only editing a tag for multiple tracks at once is missing. Though reading your comment to the bugreport mentioned above: "In the future, it might..." doesn't sound exactly promising  How about adding this "Write ... for selected" (or whatever it was called in Amarok1.4) as an intermediate solution? Editing tags for a bunch of files is a real pain atm.
Hey, this sounds greate.
But there is something still missing (or maybe I didn't read the blog with th informations). I would like to see the "next Song" and "previous Song" buttons in the metadata dialog again. Amarok 1.x had it too.
It's there: Select more than one song in the playlist, Edit Track Details, check Per Track and you can go back and forth in the selected tracks.
Oh ok, thanks. But wouldn't it be more userfriendly if it will jump through every song in the playlist instead of the selected ones?
Well no, because then it wouldn't be, you know, contextual
(which is why context menus are called what they are )
I know this is unrelated but has there been any discussions on using / modifying the plasma newspaper containment for the Amarok context view.
Hi, this is a great feature, and one for which i had been waiting for quite some time.
One thing though: perhaps it would be better if one could assign ratings (stars) to tracks without having to click on the track (to get into track editing mode)? IIRC, this was the way it worked in 1.4? great job done
Slightly off-topic, I want to thank all of you for such a STABLE piece of software called Amarok 2.2 GIT. After a major breakup today, I pulled tonight the latest GIT, and... what a difference! Shoutcast freaking WORKS! Playlist WORKS! Podcasts WORK! Amarok DOESN'T CRASH WHEN I TRY TO ZOOM IN THE FILE VIEW! Amarok DOESN'T CRASH, PERIOD! The whole thing is A LOT MORE STABLE THAN AMAROK 2.1! Needless to say, EVERYTHING THAT WORKED IN AMAROK 2.1 WORKS HERE.
You guys really rock. The only things I'm missing (all really minor) 1. Libvisual. 2. Eye candy with the song title in the Main Toolbar (a la Winamp). 3. Fullscreen button in the "Video" plasmoid. 4. OSD configuration (background color, font, like Amarok 1.4) 5. (The only one that barely qualifies as a reportable wish ) More KNotify integration, and a tray icon following the KDE new tray icons spec.6. Usability enhancements (why such a weird location for Random, it should be a small button in the Main Toolbar, for instance) 7. Keep enhancing the Shoutcast plugin. Those "Shoutcast servers are busy" messages are less and less frequent with every GIT update. Keep up the good work, and move forward to minimize them!
I also really like 2.2-git, it's at least as stable as 2.1, the new features are nice and the interface improvements are good. On the other hand I would also like a way to disable this inline editing, or at least make it harder to accidently activate. Firstly because if you don't realise you've done it you could ruin the metadata and secondly because whether or not you edit the metadata amarok changes the modification time of the file which means that random files get copied about when I sync my music collection.
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