What Playlists Feature

OK, so I'm listening to my "All Artists" playlist, with some 4000 tunes in it. I come across a Pink Floyd song, let's say "Keep Talking" on "Division Bell", so in my setup, it would be in:

By Artist
. Pink Floyd
. . Division Bell
. . . ...
. . . Keep Talking
. . . ...

Now, ordinarily, I'm in a "random mood" and the next song might be Sting, Slayer, or the 1812 Overture, but if suddenly I get "in the mood for Floyd", it'd be nice to be able to go into a "what playlists" mode, where I can basically jump to OTHER playlists which contain this file (in this case, it would list "By Artist", "Pink Floyd", and "Division Bell"), and then select to play THAT playlist instead.

By the same time maybe it also appears in a "By Genre","Rock","Classic Rock" set of playlists, and those would appear in the list of playlists as well.

Thoughts?

D

I think it sounds like an awesome mood. I find that when I typically come across an artist that I'm in the mood for, I've been unshuffleing the play list so I can hear more songs by that artist.

Being able to say 'I want to hear everything in the JPop, or Post Grunge' genre, or the 'Vertical Horizon' source would rule, and really expand the features of the player.

Just my 2 cents :)

Damien Heiser

RioCar / empeg 12GB Blue Mark 2a SN: 120001043

I'm not sure what you're asking for?

Are you saying that you want to simply play the rest of "Division Bell" when you hear the song "Keep Talking"?

If that's what you're asking, simply turning off Shuffle will do it. It'll un-shuffle "around" the song "Keep Talking", and then you're in the middle of the Division Bell playlist. This feature will be even more improved in version 1.1, but it pretty much works as-is in 1.02/1.03.

If you want to have the player do this: "Show me the playlist that the current song came from", then that's more difficult. Because when you're shuffling the whole player, it simply creates a single huge list of songs and doesn't try remember which playlists each song came from. Besides, they might be from more than one playlist.

___________
Tony Fabris

OK, I'll try to explain it better.

Let's say that "Keep Talking" appears in a number of playlists (or subplaylists)

"Division Bell"
"Pink Floyd"
"By Artist"
"By Genre"
"Rock"
"Classic Rock"

Now, all of those playlists except "Division Bell" have the "Randomize" function enabled. (If I'm actively selecting an album, I want to hear it straight through).

So, I'm listening to "Keep Talking" and decide, say, "I'm in a _______ mood", it'd be nice to be able to change my "current playlist" to "some other playlist containing this song."

This might mean "let's hear the rest of this album", "throw me in the Floyd playlist", "throw me in the Rock playlist", "throw me in the Classic Rock playlist", or (if I'm tired of floyd-exclusivity) "throw me in the By Artist playlist" [which for me is the 'big master playlist containing everything that isn't an audio-book/spoken-word track']

Does that make it a little clearer what I'm looking for? Not necessarily that I want to be dropped in the "closest playlist", but that I might want to use some other related playlist.

D

Okay, now I see what you're saying. Knowing how the Empeg handles shuffles, I'd say it's unlikely that feature is going to be appearing any time soon.

___________
Tony Fabris

Okay, now I see what you're saying. Knowing how the Empeg handles shuffles, I'd say it's unlikely that feature is going to be appearing any time soon.

Yeah, it's a bit icky, unfortunately -- though I agree it sounds like a nice feature. Problem 1 is that we'd have to scan the whole database to see which playlists this track is in. Problem 2 is that we'd then have to scan the whole database again to see which playlists those playlists are in. (Keep Talking isn't in Pink Floyd, it's in a playlist which is in Pink Floyd.) For pathological cases, this could get very inefficient.

So, in summary, not a 1.1 feature, though it's IMO a good way of dispensing with Tony's (perfectly working, but unintuitive) hop-out-of-shuffle-mode technique.

Peter

Actually, it shouldn't be that hard at all. There has to be a DB somewhere of "all the places that reference this song" (a lack of any, and an existing file, gets you into the "Unattached Items" folder). Basically all the feature request is is "what are all the playlists which reference this FID", but done recursively (to also say, "OK, that playlist.. what are all the playlists which reference THAT?" until you get to the root playlist)

D

There has to be a DB somewhere of "all the places that reference this song" (a lack of any, and an existing file, gets you into the "Unattached Items" folder).

That's the other way round from the database in the car player, though. Emplode has to build that inverse database from the car player's one; that's why only emplode, not the player, puts things in Unattached Items. (It'd be a waste of precious memory to have the database in the player both ways round.)

The player only knows the children of each (playlist) FID, not the parents of each FID.

Peter

Ah.... ugh... so it isn't easy to make it happen.

So accepting that its HARD to make it happen, .. er, um.. could it?

It's a very cool/useful feature, IMHO.

D

What will it do when the song is in more than one playlist?

What will it do when the song is in more than one playlist?

(I assume you're talking about what happens when shuffle is turned off.)

In 1.0x, it will un-shuffle and drop you into the middle of one of those playlists. You can't be sure of which one it'll drop you into.

In 1.1x (due out soon), it fixes this. It will drop you into the first playlist containing that track. "First" in this case means whichever playlists are ordered first in Emplode (based on the "position" column).

So, with the alpha version of 1.1 that I'm testing, I have all of my artist/album playlists ordered first in the list. Then all my various and "mood" playlists last. That way, when I un-shuffle, I will always be dropped back into that album. So when a Pink Floyd track comes up in the shuffle, I can press "0" on the remote control and listen to the rest of that album.

___________
Tony Fabris