Using Dynamic Mode

Sunday, September 4. 2005

I’m going to write a short entry on using the new dynamic mode which exists in amaroK 1.3.

Everybody should know that amaroK is an application which is based around large collections, and not large playlists. Dynamic mode is a feature that should allow you the flexibility of picking music from your entire collection (or subset of) whilst keeping a relatively small playlist which is easy to maintain. Firstly, navigate to the Playlist Browser and enable dynamic mode and click the button to expand the options.

Lets go through some of the options and what they do:

Type of song to append: When a song ends, another song is added to the playlist. This can be either Random, Suggested (a la append suggestions) or Playlist Shuffle. The last option allows you to choose a number of (smart)playlists to choose songs from. You can add sources by using the context menu on an entry in the browser.
Cycle Tracks: This allows for keeping a small playlist. After a song is played, amaroK can remove the first entry in the playlist if you wish.
Mark History: Enable ‘jukebox’ like mode. This will mark all played tracks with a grey colour. Useful for parties when you want a queue of items and you want people to be able to know which tracks have been recently played.
Played tracks to show: Only after ‘x’ number of tracks will they start to be removed. ie - the size of the back queue.
Upcoming tracks: Show this number of tracks in the queue.
Tracks to append: The number of tracks to append when a song finishes.

If you are looking at using the old ‘append suggestion’ mode from the 1.2.x series, these are the settings you should use: Type - Suggestions; Append Count: 4

Use the Repopulate button to refresh all the upcoming tracks, if you find the selection crap!

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 20:10 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thanks for the explanation. The new way seems to work out much better than the old way.

I like to reduce the "Upcoming tracks" down to about 6 or so, than add in a few select songs from the collection so I get a mix of those types. With the upcoming tracks up too high, the appended suggestions tend to overwhelm the playlist with one genre of song (15 Jazz in a row because I played a Tito Puente song).

Are the appended suggestions based solely on the currently playing track, or does is use a few of them in the playlist? Based on my experience, I'd guess the former, but the latter would make for a more balanced mix.

#1 Tom (Homepage) on 2005-09-05 10:31 (Reply)

I think dynamic mode is excellent, it's a great idea and it works very well. However, it would be so helpful if there was a "maximum upcoming" songs option as well as minimum.
I'm trying to use it much like a jukebox - if, and only if, there are no more songs upcoming, I'd like it to add one (or more). This way, the playlist grows as people add songs but shrinks again as they're played and removed.
Instead of this, dynamic mode can only let the playlist grow because it always adds at least one song every time a song is played.
I've spent hours trying to make a script to "tame" dynamic mode's enthusiasm, but the dcom calls are lacking (eg addRandomSong or removeTrackByIndex) which makes it too difficult to emulate this behaviour.
What do you think?
Paul

#2 Paul on 2005-09-19 13:06 (Reply)

Loving Amarok and thanks for the info! My take: I definitely agree with Paul that configuring Dynamic mode is not intuitive and there should be another or other ways to configure it. If it hadn't been for your page, I don't think I wouldn't figured it out at all.

#2.1 Jet Peach on 2006-01-07 14:47 (Reply)

Dynamic mode is great, excellent job! That being said, I have two small gripes (isn't that always the way we pushy people are??).

1. There should be more ways to get to the configuration. I remembered seeing it the dynamic config menu, but I couldn't remember specifically where it was so I spent about 5 minutes trying to find it only to give up until I read this blog!

I tried to right click the dynamic icon near the progress bar, but that just turns dynamic mode off. Then I looked for the appropriate options in the menu bar. The only entry that looked close was in the Settings:Configure Amarok menu which didn't have anything...anyway, there ideally should be more access points to the dynamic options.

2. When I double click a new track in dynamic mode, it immediately moves that track to the next song to be played...which is fine...but there's a reason that I clicked a song 5 songs down...those 4 songs in between sucked!

I think it would be preferable to move the songs between the current and the song you clicked all "up" into the "played" section so that I don't have to delete the songs in between (and so they aren't constantly queued next).

#3 Matt on 2005-10-27 22:14 (Reply)

2. When I double click a new track in dynamic mode, it immediately moves that track to the next song to be played...which is fine...but there's a reason that I clicked a song 5 songs down...those 4 songs in between sucked!

Wow. that had been bothering me greatly, and I hadn't managed to put my finger on it. Right now skipping ahead in dynamic mode is kind of redundant with the queue feature. The reason I skipped ahead in the playlist was because I didn't want to hear any of the tracks, not because I wanted to hear a later song now. And if that were the case, I could just use queue.

#3.1 ryon on 2006-02-19 16:45 (Reply)

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