[DaveBlake]

So what, exactly, is the difference between nodes and playlist? When would you want to use one over the other?

For the difference between custom nodes and smart playlists see #25 where this is asked and answered. But I will assume you were actually asking a new question about folder type nodes and rule based nodes since that was the previous post

The big difference for the user between folder type custom nodes and rule type custom nodes is the drill down behaviour when you select an item. There are internal implementation differences too, the database queries are more efficient on folder type, but what can be achived is more limited than the flexible rules that can be created with the rule type.

Folder type custom nodes exactly mimic the way that the default nodes work. For example say you have very many music genres, pages of them, and so would like to have a special subset of them on a smaller menu for easy access. I would create folder type nodes for this, arranged in a submenu, one for each of my favorite genres.

Code:

<path>musicdb://artists/?genre=Rock</path>

would give me a node that displays exactly the same artists that clicking on a genre of "Rock" on the genre node. If I then drill down and click on an artist I get the albums node showing albums for that artist with songs of that genre. Drill further down I get those songs.

But say you used a rule type node instead.

Code:

<content>artists</content>
<rule field="genre" operator="is">
<value>Rock</value>
</rule>

This would show the same artists as above. However, like with playlists, the rule does not pass to the items below it. So click on an artist and you will see all of their albums regardless of genre, and further down all the songs.

Does this matter? Well if you have an artist than crosses several genres then these two approaches produce quite different results. If you want default node like behaviour you have to use folder type custom nodes.

I hope that makes things clearer for some people. But it is a more advanced topic, so don't be upset if it is less than clear!