Friday, October 19. 2007Nikolaj's sort of, but not really, weekly status update, part whatever
I thought it was time to make a little noise again, so here is part whatever ( I think it is 3 actually ) of my "What have I been doing this week" updates.
The reason for the irregularity is quite simple that some weeks I end up doing mostly Magnatune stuff. And while this is cool in itself, and I am also working on some features that will have an impact on Amarok, it is not really something I can blog a whole lot about just yet. Anyways, here goes. This week I have been putting some more work into the new playlist. I added some new features ( more on that a little later ) but these turned out to really stress some of the sore points of the playlist with regards to performance. So a big part of this week has been spent making sure that the playlist holds up under load. For now, I have tested it with 3000+ tracks in groups of up to about 500 tracks. The 3000+ track part now runs really well, and as long as groups are not above about a 100 tracks each, these do not pose a problem either. For very large groups, performance does suffer a bit,but since the groups are meant to contain single albums, I am not really sure how much of an issue this is. In general, it already seems to run better with a large amounts of tracks added than the playlist in the 1.4 series. Also, remember that our focus is not, and have never been, on adding the entire collection to the playlist, but instead on using smart and dynamic playlists to provide the same functionality in a much more convenient way ( Dynamic playlist walkthrough ). The new features I mentioned earlier is support for collapsible album groups. The implementation is basically done, but how it will be used ( whether automatic some how or purely manual ) is undecided, so for now, I made it a button that the user can press to expand or collapse an album, along with some very simple logic to make sure, that if we start playing a track from within a collapsed group, it is automatically expanded. I also brewed up some example graphics for how such a collapsed album could be visualized. Here is a screenshot:  Following the last few posts about the new playlist, we got a lot of very positive feedback in the form of mockups and ideas for how to improve the graphics. As I am no great artist, we really appreciate this and would welcome new ideas. However, if you wish to do mockups or try out some new ideas, please base it on this file as that will make actually trying it out in Amarok much simpler. It should be possible to figure out what each element is used for based on the group names in the file, but basically, an album group consists of a head item, a number of body items (one for each track - 2 ) and a tail item, with some alternate backgrounds rendered for every other item. Over the last few weeks, I have also been keeping a little pet project. By showing this off now, I run the risk of being called a "sellout to the vocal minority" but such is life. Since the new playlist is based ( sort of ) on the model/view framework of Qt4, I wondered how difficult it would be to make an alternate playlist view that retains much of the look and feel of the 1.4.x series. Doing a small, but very limited, prototype of this turned out to be very simple, and it is now possible to alternate between the two views by pressing the little star button at the bottom right corner. Switching the view and ( just for fun ) minimizing the context view ( which is already possible just by resizing the 3 panes ), gives us something that looks like this:  That does look strangely familiar I think... Now, heres the kicker ( and why I don't think I deserve the label of "sellout" ). I don't have time to bring this alternate playlist view to a usable state. And I am not even sure it is needed, seeing how the new playlist is really coming along very nicely. But the ground work has been put in place, so if anyone feels strongly enough about this feature making it into Amarok2 ( Some people has certainly been very vocal about not liking the new playlist ), now is the time to step up and implement it!  Do note, that there is no guarantee that it will be possible to hide the context view in the future as this currently being discussed.Last but not least, do remember our Roktoberfest We are 75% of the way, but the things are slowing down a lot, so we really need these last donations to reach our goal and keep the Amarok team hacking for another year! Trackbacks
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Please, make selection sell not raw blue. Make it rounded corner and similar as playlist elements style! Tnx! )
I really like the look of the new playlist, though the colours are a bit harsh.
But the thing above the playlist, explaining what the items are (time, artist, album etc) - I think you really can and should get rid of that.... It just wastes space, and really, ppl can figure out what the artist, time and album is - they generally know their music.
That is not the point of those items above the playlist. The plan is, even though it is not fully implemented yet, that this widget will be used to select what information will be displayed in each of the 4 positions of tracks in the playlist (how this will work with groups have not been decided yet ).
In other words, it is a test widget for configuring the items in the playlist. As for the colors, we a playing around with several options, and hopefully one of our artist will come up with something better.
Unless you can make the widget significantly smaller (on the order of a button) and/or nicer looking and/or also be able to do sorting, I'd rather use a button which opens a dialog (or expanding-thingie at the top of the playlist) with the widget in it. Configuring the playlist is something most people do only once if ever, so there's no need to have constant access.
On top of what Nikolaj says about it, it is also further to be thought of as the listview header - what you might see, of course, is a smaller version of it, so it takes up somewhat less space (see my mockup of a blog entry or two ago for further details on that...)
> Also, remember that our focus is not, and have never been, on adding the entire collection to the playlist, but instead on using smart and dynamic playlists to provide the same functionality in a much more convenient way
ah... that explains much. most times recently that I've tried Amarok, I've given up before it even played anything, as the first action I perform is to try get it to import my music database, which is pretty large. when Amarok explodes (sometimes taking the laptop and local neighborhood with it), I usually shrug it off as it's just as it has always been, and go back to playing from the console using mplayer as usual. after all, if Amarok can't even load up my playlist, then how can it be expected to play anything from it? I'll be giving it another try soon when KDE4 is released. no expectations of success, though.
What you say about Amarok dying horribly is something that sounds a little out of order to me - it should take a long time on big collections, sure, that is to be expected, but crash because of the size? Definitely not... The biggest collection that Amarok is known to work with is roughly 600,000 tracks, so size alone should certainly not cause this sort of problem. If you would pop into #amarok on freenode we might be able to figure out what's going wonky with it (and heed the "calc help" message, of course
 )My feeble guess is that there is a track somewhere in that enormous database which causes amarok's collection scanner (which really should not be possible in 1.4.6 and above, but... likely still is, what with it being software, of course ).
To be honest, it's probably not all Amarok's fault - the collection is housed on a machine in my attic, shared over either SMB, CIFS or NFS depending on how annoyed I am with either one. The network delay is probably a major cause in the problem.
My wife runs Amarok for her small collection of files which she keeps on her laptop. It appears to work fine for her, so I think it may be the huge number of files in mine combined with the network. Any complaints I have are good-natured and not meant to slam Amarok in any way. As an aside, I'm Irish, and I remember thinking last time I tried to load my collection "when will this be finished? Amárach" ("amárach" is Irish for "tomorrow")
I use Amarok almost everyday and it's a very good application. The new version looks very exciting!
I was wondering, what will happen in your new playlist view when you have a playlist that has, say, 20 songs all from different albums? Will they all have an album thumbnail displayed update to them? For some context, I tend to buy lots of classical music, which is cheap so I might buy 20 CDs worth at a time. I then make smart playlists like "songs I haven't rated yet ordered by time last listened to" to gradually rate all my music to find the songs I like. I then listen to the higher rated ones in a similar order. Basically, it's very rare for me to even think about albums; they really don't have much meaning to me anymore. It's more about who the composer is or how I rated songs. Also, Amazon tends to do a very bad job of finding album covers and gives really silly ones for most CDs (e.g. a random rock band for Chopin) so I tend to just delete all album covers. When I see the collapsible widget for albums in the screenshots, it seems to give albums an extra importance. I was wondering if you were considering people who tend to not listen to whole albums anymore but random tracks by some other criteria?
Also going back to what bob said, when I use the dynamic playlist mode, I never get songs by album there either. How does the per album view fit in with Amarok's dynamic playlist feature?
When using a dynamic playlist, the elements shown will most likely be rendered as single tracks and not grouped at all. This takes up significantly more space per track, but since dynamic playlist do not have to how that many tracks at once, I am not sure this will really be an issue.
That said, we do not have dynamic playlists up and running in Amarok 2 yet. If, when we start testing it,it turns out that the new playlist does not work well with dynamic playlists, we will of course find a way to deal with it. We are all users of Amarok as well as developers, so if something is annoying or unusable, we tend to find out very quickly.
@bob,
I don't know what sort of classical music you listen too. But most classical music forms have multiple movements (tracks), composed to be played together as part of a whole work (kind of like an album). If you re-tag all your music along these lines then the new playlist will work quite well. Destroys the concept of the album as a CD, which will muck up album covers, but this doesn't matter too much for classical music anyway.
In the playlist, the shiny highlights are not needed on the alternate entries.
The softly recessed entries would look good on their own. And yes, the selection blue clashes. I like the zigzag abbreviation line, but perhaps it should fade out too - it's the most eye catching thing in the playlist at the moment.
The "classic" 1.4 mode looks really nice. I'd perhaps be interested in helping out with it when I get some time.
Good job!
The possibility to switch between the old and new playlists is a great idea. I've done the same in mine foobar2000 configuration (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=52890&view=findpost&p=515627). If anyone of you is running Windows, you can try it out. The advantage of the old playlist is the possibility to sort the plalyist by columns. Maybe this should be implemented in the new one as a dropdown menu.
Also I'm wondering if anyone ever thought about implementing some sort of browsing the library like in my configuration above the playlist (iTunes/Winamp style). It is possible to do it from the tree view too, but this is much more convenient.
That's more or less possible in the new one as well - mind you, it is not implemented yet, but that does not mean that it won't be
See my mockup of a couple of blog entries ago on how this is being envisioned
Thanks for the quick reply. I see it now. This will be perfect.
Just one more thing: I would really appreciate to have the possibility to rate tracks directly in playlist. Do you think you will retain this possibility? Also it would be very nice if AmaroK can read and write tags used by foobar2000. I'm talking about rating and playback statistics. I'm using dual boot - Windows/Linux. On Windows I use foobar2000 and on Linux AmaroK. I would welcome the possibility to have all the information in tags (not in DB). foobar2000 can (depending on user's preferences) do it. But AmaroK can't AFAIK.
Inline editing of information in the playlist is going to be possible. And since the information shown can be configured by the user, I see no reason why it should not be possible to rate tracks directly in the playlist if the rating is displayed.
Honestly, right now, compatibility with foobar2k is not a big priority. As always, things can change, and we always welcome new contributors who would like to implement a specific feature.
It's not just compatibility with fb2k, I'm talking about interoperability between all players (even HW). And also if I move my music from PC to notebook, I lost all my ratings and playback statistics if they are not stored in tags.
Unfortunately I'm not a good programmer and the only language I know is PHP-GTK. But I think it shouldn't be difficult to implement, just reading and writing of a few tags.
make sure you don't forget to implement that it is possible to see (and change!) the ratings in your playlist. from my point of view this is crucial
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