From Amarok Wiki
Contents |
Introduction
If you have used another media player before you are probably familiar with the concept of having all of your music in a single playlist, playing it in random order.
If you've tried this in Amarok, especially if you have a larger collection, you may have realized that it doesn't work well. This page will explain how to use Amarok's dynamic playlist feature to solve that, and other, problems.
Click on screenshots for full size images.
Amarok 1.4 series
Start Amarok, open the "Playlists" tab on the left hand side. If all you see is the playlist, just click on any of the tabs to unhide them.
Creating a new smart playlist
Right click on "Smart Playlists", choose "New Smart Playlist".
A new window appears, which allows you to define various aspects of your new smart playlist.
Start with naming your new smart playlist - choose some simple name. See other options, but for now just create one condition that seems useful to you and would match to a part of your collection. Click "OK" to save.
Creating a new dynamic playlist
Right click on "Dynamic Playlist", choose "New Dynamic Playlist".
A new window appears with different playlists on the left hand side and some options on right hand side.
You can choose any number, but just select your new smart playlist - you will be able to return to this dialog to edit existing or create new smart playlists. Name this new dynamic playlist (to be on the safe side, choose a different name than any of existing smart playlists - older Amarok versions were acting weird if you had a smart and a dynamic playlist with identical names). Take a look at other options, but don't change them. Click "OK" to save.
Load a dynamic playlist
Clear your current main playlist (the track list that is at the right side of the main window), and then doubleclick your new dynamic playlist (or right click it and choose "Load").
The main playlist now should be populated with 15 tracks. Press "play" and listen to music. Play some 10 tracks. Notice what happens upon track change. Notice what happens when you have 5 played tracks. It should be clear now what dynamic playlists do, and we also took a look at smart playlists on the way.
While listening to the music, look at the smart playlists - the ones chosen as sources for the dynamic playlist are denoted by a star.
There are some predefined smart playlists that you can use right now, like "All Collection" and "Never Played" (it should be obvious what they do). Later, when you have played, rated and done other things with your tracks, you can create other smart playlists that contain only unrated tracks, only tracks with rating or score exceeding some value and a bunch of other criteria. Then, you can create any number of dynamic playlists that draw tracks from any number and combination of smart playlists (and also usual playlists, if you choose so).
So dynamic playlists with a help from smart playlists help you to keep the main playlist to a manageable size while still allowing a great degree of randomisation. Of course, you can remove tracks (new ones will be added as necessary), add new tracks (for example, by dragging them from the collection browser) and so on - you are not restriced in any way by the tracks drawn from the chosen sources.
You can easily add tracks you want to play - just drag them from your collection to any place in the main playlist (below the current track, of course). You can use queue with dynamic playlist, though queued tracks will be moved in order below the current track (so queuing isn't much different here from simple reordering of tracks). Reordering queued tracks later is quite pointless, they will be brought back to the queue order anyway.
A dynamic playlist in use
Now that you have used your dynamic playlist for a while, let's see what different things mean.
- At the top left side of the main playlist, you can see name of the currently loaded dynamic playlist (dynamic_test). Remember, you can have several dynamic playlists with different settings.
- At the top right side of the main playlist, there are three buttons that control currently loaded dynamic playlist :
- Edit - opens dynamic playlist editing dialog upon currently loaded dynamic playlist;
- Repopulate - removes existing unplayed tracks and adds new ones according to currently loaded dynamic playlist settings (mostly sources and upcoming tracks);
- Turn Off - disables dynamic mode, results in current playlist contents transforming to a normal playlist.
- Last track in the playlist is blue. This is not dynamic playlist specific, but a new feature after Amarok 1.4.4 - all new tracks that have been added to the playlist are denoted in a different colour. With dynamic playlist, that usually is single last track (though it can be any number of last tracks, if more than one track had to be added, or any number of arbitrary tracks you have added manually).
- Tracks that have been played are disabled (dimmed, greyed out). You can not add new tracks in that area or reorder tracks into it, but you can queue tracks from there and when dragging from played area into unplayed area, these tracks are enabled again (only after 1.4.4, until 1.4.4 those tracks would stay disabled).
Tips
- If you want the dynamic playlist to prioritise tracks by score or rating, you have to base it on a custom smart playlist. For this playlist, choose "Order by" -> "Random" and "<Score|Rating> Weighted" (Thanks to cocobo for pointing this out on #amarok).
Notes:
- Older versions of Amarok (before 1.4.5) have a noticeable delay when a track advances. Starting from 1.4.5, a pool of 200 tracks is built, and then new tracks are added from this pool - this makes the process instantaneous.
- Older versions of Amarok (before 1.4.5) had a reduced randomisation for bulk track adding (like loading a dynamic playlist, repopulating it or adding several items at once). This is much better starting from 1.4.5.
- Older versions of Amarok (before 1.4.5) would add tracks upon track change despite there being more than "Upcoming tracks" in the playlist. Latter versions of Amarok add new tracks only when there actually are less than required tracks.