Kodi Community Forum

Hello
Last weekend i am having a party. There are many guests who select music from my large music collection during the whole night. XBMC is in filemode because my music collection is sorted into a appropriate order where everyone can find a desired song very fast or just browse thru the collection.

Most of the guests (incuding myself) has a problem with controlling the playlist . All the times if someone selecting a song with the 'SELECT'-Key than XBMC deleting the whole current playlist (). It is not possible to prevent this behaviour by editing the keymapping (i.e. map the 'QUEUE'-Action on the 'enter'-key), because on the 'enter'-Key should be the SELECT-Action otherwise I cannot navigate into folders.

So I think about this problem and have the follolwing thoughts:

With these 3 (simple) options you can control the behaviour very individual:

• Prevent clearing Playlist by selecting a item (true/false) // similar like an auto-queuing behaviour
  
• Only transfer selected item to playlist (true/false) // today ALL single songs in the same folder are transfering to the playlist. I would have the coice about this behaviour. For me its better if only the selected song is transfered to the playlist.
  
• Play the newly selected item directly (true/false) // internaly that means that XBMC jumps directly to the newly inserted item in the playlist
  

So if these options would be available at the last weekend I activate the first two of them and have a very practical behaviour at my party.
No one can accidentally clear the playlist be simply pressing the 'SELECT'-Key (A party is a party! - Nobody is such concentrate to never touch the popular Select-Button if he simply want to queue a song. It mostly happens if you confuse a song by a folder)
Another advantage of these options is to prevent playlist from fill up with songs from an album where I only want to hear one song.
And at the end of a long party you have the whole playlist with all the songs played at this night.

Best of all: If you want the old/original behaviour you can deactivate these above-mentioned options.
It would be very cool if the user could choose between these options. What do you think about?

Best regards
Jarny

... sorry for my lousy english

Yea! I really like your suggestions. I experience the same difficulties when having people over.

It would be nice, if when you press Select, a popup menu appears giving options such as, asking to Play the song now, or Add it to Playlist.

All you require is QUEUE by default rather than SELECT. That hardly requires 3 options, right?

Ok, so let us find the best solution for this problem.

JDizzy Wrote:It would be nice, if when you press Select, a popup menu appears giving options such as, asking to Play the song now, or Add it to Playlist.

I think this solution would drive most people crazy. Everytime you select a song you have to answer the dialog is not very useable. But maybe if you you can activate this dialog in the configuration you an others would be happy.

jmarshall Wrote:All you require is QUEUE by default rather than SELECT. That hardly requires 3 options, right?

Ok, if I think twice about my solution then I agree with you that 3 options are not required.
But the 'default QUEUE' is also not the best solution. Queuing should not happens when the cursor is on a folder. On folders I would prefer the 'SELECT'-action that means 'go into folder' because you can navigate very fast.
So if there is an option: "Default action on song selection: (play|queue|none)" I would be happy for the first time. The option 'None' means, that you only can navigate with the cursor- an select-button. But if you want to play or queue you have to press your explicit 'play'-button or 'queue'-button.

Maybe this is not the very best solution but its better than accidentally kill your playlist 20 times at a party

Or maybe we have to continue discussion to find a easier and intuitively solution.
More ideas are welcome.

Regards
Jarny

Jarny Wrote:Maybe this is not the very best solution but its better than accidentally kill your playlist 20 times at a party

this of course is a valid topic when ppl navigate through xbmc without knowing it much, and many ppl are not happy with the current behaviour. if you actually start an album track by selecting it while there is already a "now playing list" (it's far from being a real playlist, as it is temporary), the previous list gets replaced with the current album. this - sorry to say so - sucks.

but i don't think we need a user-selectable switch in the options.
an idea would be that the select button acts differently when (and only when) player already has media, so it switches from playing the selected song to add it to the now playing list instead, forcing the user to use the play button if he actually want to play that song at once (and knows the now playing list will be emptied then). this might be more intuitive and prevent that accidental deleting of the list.

what about that? possible?

I'm against different behaviour based on context that the user is not aware, and hence there needs some way for the user to specify this.

@Jarny: Clearly the default select action for folders would still be ENTER. I was meaning purely the default select action for songs.

Also, I see zero point in "None" other than it'll cause frustration

Cheers,
Jonathan

Sorry to disagree, jmarshall, but I am FOR context based behaviour. To me it seems logical.

Why should the default "select" action change just because something is playing? This seems completely unintuitive to me.

If I press a button, I want it to do the same thing it did last time (where possible).

If the user is allowed to change the default action to "Queue" then effectively this gives "play the first item, queue anything after that", assuming we keep the usual rule of "if something is queued and nothing is playing then queue and play".

Compare to some other common players, Winamp for instance. If music is not playing (winamp is not running) and I press enter on a song in Windows Explorer, Winamp will fire up and play that song. However, if Winamp is already running and playing a song and I press enter on a song, it will be queued in the playlist.

I think many users are used to this sort of behaviour. For you it is not logical. For me, and a bunch of other users it is logical. This is why I vote for it being configurable. Just like it is in Winamp, where you can configure "Enqueue as default action".

Um, isn't that exactly what I suggested :p

Um, maybe :-)

This has been discussed so many times now. I'd still say, people should use the playlist editor. This is basically what Winamp does too.

In the playlist editor select on the left hand pane should enqueue that particular song to the playlist on the right hand pane. In the right hand pane select should play that song and send the songs currently in the right hand pane to now playing.

Right now hitting select in the right hand pane triggers that song to play and not send it to the playlist in the right hand pane and you can't send the list from the right pane to now playing without saving the list and reopening it again manually.

Are you talking about the "Smart Playlist Editor" mentioned here:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Playlists
?

No, I'm talking about the "normal" playlist editor.

In library view hit playlists ==> new playlist.