[carsten89]

First of all, I love xbmc. I am used to iTunes, and so I constantly compare. So far, xbmc has won my favour in every aspect - but one.

Currently, you can create intelligent or manual playlists.
For intelligent playlists, you can use a couple of criteria, and either use an "AND"-linkage (tracks have to satisfy all of the criteria to get into the playlist) or an "OR"-linkage (tracks have to satisfy at least one of the criteria to get into the playlist).
However, iTunes provides a more flexible approach here:
You can nest criteria with "AND" and "OR".
For example, I would love to build a playlist with the following behaviour:
All Tracks from Nightwish or Blind Guardian where the comment-field does not contain the word "Live".

I know that this can currently be achieved by using the "Playlist is" attribute, e.g.
One Playlist P1 "Nightwish OR Blind Guardian" and another one "Playlist is P1 AND comment does not contain Live", but reaching a higher complexity then requires an increasing amount of playlists that do serve no other purpose than to help build the "actual" playlist, which is quite annoying - especially since there is no concept of "Playlist folders" in xbmc that I know of, which would allow you to hide the playlists that are only "helper"-playlists in another directory so they don't flood the interface. (By the way, Playlist folders would be a nice feature as well).
Plus, the "Playlist is"-selector only works on intelligent playlists. While I can understand this behaviour from a programmer's point of view, it's annoying from a user's point of view - why shouldn't an intelligent playlist be able to check the contents of my manually created one?

I would love to see these features in xbmc :-)
I hope you agree.

Regards,
Carsten

[Martijn]

already done for next release

[carsten89]

Very cool - when? :-)

[Montellese]

What I call the "Extended OR" functionality has been in the nightly builds for a month or so. I added it as part of my GSoC work and you can find a short explanation and screenshots here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1133140

But this only allows you to do an playlist with AND and then specify multiple ORed values for a specific rule. So you can do

Code:

(actor is Nicolas Cage OR Christian Bale) AND (genre is Action OR Adventure) AND (...) ...

But you can't really do any other nested logic that mixes AND and OR. But it's certainly a step in the right direction. I have also written the code for any kind of complex AND and OR combination but it's impossible to integrate that in a 10-foot-interface like XBMC.

[jmarshall]

Note that for full nested logic you need to use the playlist in playlist functionality. My guess is you don't really need this once you have the extended OR stuff anyway.