advanced playlists in amarok

Lately I've been making greater use of smart and dynamic playlists in amarok. I felt it would be criminally callous not to share my experiences and appreciation.

A dynamic playlist is really a configurable playback mode that automatically enqueues random tracks for playing and removes played tracks from view as each track ends. Each dynamic playlist uses one or more playlists, including smart playlists, as the source of tracks. (The built-in dynamic playlist "Random Mix" just uses the entire collection.) The user can add or remove or reorder tracks while the dynamic playlist is running, but the dynamic playlist will only add or remove tracks as it needs to, according to its settings. The aim of this feature is to keep the resource use of the player down, of course, and the visible list of tracks to a manageable level. It reminds me of the "stream" or "lazy sequence" concept--if one is only processing one or a small subset of members of the input at once, it's more efficient to sequentially retrieve or produce no more than that input portion for the algorithm, as it proceeds. In actuality, the input stream may be internally buffered for efficiency, though this doesn't matter to the consuming algorithm.

I'm more impressed by smart playlists, which aptly provide another demonstration of the value in storing audio metadata in a database. Smart playlists are defined by setting desired track characteristics. The smart playlist then automatically includes tracks with those characteristics. This is a straightforward idea for relieving users of the daunting alternative task: managing a custom playlist's contents through repetitive interface manipulations (for small playlists and collections, this is a chore, for larger playlists and collections, this is nigh-unworkable). What turns smart playlists from a helpful aid to a swoon-inducing beloved companion is the comprehensiveness of the create/edit window. The query-building capability is dreamy. Its power is intoxicating. A competing Ajax application (is there one?) would need to work hard to convince a user to stray.

The set of characteristics to query on includes the usual standbys, Title and Artist and Album and Genre. The additional options, that make one go week in the knees, are Length, Play Count, Year, Comment, First Play and Last Play date, Score, Rating, Mount Point, BPM, Bitrate, and Label. Labels, also known as tags in other contexts, are words associated with tracks in a many-to-many relationship. As usual, the value lies in the ability to create ad-hoc groups using the labels/tags. One smart playlist could contain all tracks with one label, another smart playlist could contain all tracks with another label, etc. This way of creating playlists by label may not seem superior to the technique of creating custom playlists. However, when a new track should be in five different custom playlists, it's easier to drag the five corresponding previously-used labels onto the new track and let the playlists do the grouping work.

To make the process of entering a filtered characteristic still more alluring, after choosing a particular characteristic from the drop-down list, a set of controls to the right of the list change to only offer the choices that make sense for that characteristic. For instance, a numerical characteristic leads to a drop-down list of connectives such as "is", "is not", "is greater than", "is less than", followed by an input box for numbers (and little increment/decrement arrows to change the value by clicking, if you swing that way). A textual characteristic switches the list of connectives to regexp-like choices such as "contains", "starts with", "does not start with", followed by a combobox whose assisting drop-down portion contains all the actual examples of the chosen characteristic in the collection. After choosing Genre, it might contain Reggae. This is more than "user-friendliness". This is admirable consideration in the partnership between interface and user. The fewer mistakes the user is likely to make, the less aggravation is involved in getting what he (or she) really really wants.

So the depth of each filtering characteristic reaches areas of need the user wasn't aware was there, but further enamoring is the possible breadth. On the far right of each characteristic are two buttons labeled + and -. Clicking + adds a new, identical row of controls for filtering based on an additional characteristic. As you might expect, clicking - on a row of controls removes it and its associated characteristic filter. A group of any number of filtering characteristics, that can grow or shrink on command (I've never craved more than three), is fine, but it lacks some flexibility: this assumes that all the filters must be satisfied simultaneously. What about when a user merely wants one or more of the filters to be satisfied by any one track? The filters the user wants to treat this way are separately grouped on screen under a header that starts with the words "Match Any" (the other grouping's header starts with the words "Match All").

Underneath, the window has some options for organizing the resulting list of tracks. The user may order the tracks according to a particular characteristic in ascending or descending order. At the time the playlist is loaded by the player, the tracks can be resorted easily, and a dynamic playlist based on the smart playlist would play tracks randomly in any case, so the order option isn't of much interest apart from its use in conjunction with the limit option. In the same way, using the limit option to keep a playlist small is not necessary if playback proceeds in a dynamic playlist. But put together, the order and limit options could enable the creation of a playlist of the "twenty top-rated tracks less than two minutes long", for instance. (Ratings and scores are different things in amarok, but that's a whole 'nother blog entry.) The "expand" option selects a characteristic to automatically group tracks into subsidiary playlists, in each of which all the tracks have that same characteristic in common. In the playlist choosing pane, the subsidiary playlists appear as "tree children" of the smart playlist--expanding the smart playlist like a folder shows all of its subsidiary playlists indented underneath it as separate playlists. Choosing an expand option is probably not an appreciable gain for most smart playlists, but for huge lists it's valuable.

Did you know that clicking the middle button (or possibly the scroll wheel, depending on the mouse) on the amarok tray icon pauses and resumes? If the devil's in the details, then amarok is my Dark Lord.