Dynamic Playlist Contents, by Artist/Album/Folder/Genre/Sub-playlist

Dynamic Playlist Contents, by Artist/Album/Folder/Genre/Sub-playlist

*** Luke Scott - [email protected]

I have been writing a web-based equivalent of ZINF's music catalog for a
while, and one very important difference between ZINF and Apollo (my
software) is that Apollo's playlist contents are not forced to be songs. In
other words, when a user adds an artist to a playlist (like dragging an
artist into the playlist contents window in ZINF), instead of adding the
individual songs within that artist, the artist itself is added. That way,
as a user's song collection grows, and more songs by that artist are added,
they are automatically added to the appropriate playlists as well.

Example of where this is EXTREMELY useful: a nighttime playlist of mine, for
falling asleep to, has a few really good blues artists that I like at night.
When I add more Muddy Waters to my collection, I don't want to manually add
each new song to the nighttime playlist, because of two reasons:

1. Laziness. If a piece of software can remember that I like muddy waters at
night, and do the associated menial tasks like associating his songs with
that playlist, then why should I?

2. I won't remember which songs to add, because I won't remember which ones
are new. When I add new songs to my collection I don't always remember the
titles when it's time to go manage my playlists. This is especially hairy
because ZINF's playlists allow duplicate entries, meaning that I can't even
"re-add" muddy waters to the playlist in order to pick up the new songs.
(I'm not sure if ZINF has a "remove duplicates" option)  ***see my other
issue titled "Multiple Instances of Playlist Contents"***

Issues with this technique:
*To allow a user to add all songs by an artist, without automatically adding
further songs by that artist, they must be recorded in the playlist as
songs. The technical side of this isn't difficult, it is just a matter of
how it is recorded in the .m3u file. But it is difficult to make the
discrepancy obvious in the GUI. In other words, the user has to know whether
s/he is adding an artist, or just that artist's songs, and the user must
also know the implication that adding the artist will also add future songs
by that artist, while simply adding the songs will not.

*More complicated GUI. Instead of having a simple list of songs, like what
is currently displayed, the GUI would have to list artists, songs, albums,
etc. side by side. To do this cleanly, I would suggest using an icon beside
each item, to identify it as an album, artist, or whatever. Clicking on this
icon will expand a subtree to show the songs inside it, which would not be
editable (in other words, you can expand the "radiohead" playlist entry to
see what songs are being added within it, but you can't remove "kid A" from
"radiohead" without removing all of "radiohead").

*The .m3u file is no longer compatible with other applications. This
shouldn't be a problem because ZINF is quite possibly the best music
application out there. The real issue would be backward-compatibility within
ZINF. The best workaround for this would be to store playlist contents in a
database-style structure (that's what Apollo does), so that it is completely
internal to the application. There could be an option to save the playlist
as a .m3u file.



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