ability to manipulate playlists as objects

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chriss
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Move playlists - Recently Added Tracks-Recently Added Conten

Post by chriss »

Hi,

I've got roughly a thousand "recently added" playlists in "recently added tracks", upgrading to MM4 it now puts them in "Recently Added Content". I'd prefer them all in one place but I can't seem to select all to move them all to Recently Added Content, but I can move them one at a time which will be tedious to say the least. Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers
Chris
Lowlander
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Re: Move playlists - Recently Added Tracks-Recently Added Co

Post by Lowlander »

You can't select multiple Playlists to be moved.
frankenpod
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ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by frankenpod »

This is actually something that annoyed me about iTunes, but, unless I'm missing something, MM seems to have the exact same limitation.

I mean, GUIs have allowed you to grab groups of objects and do things with them as a group since they were invented, so I don't quite understand why music managers (not just MM) don't let you select a bunch of playlists and move them around together (or delete them or export them or whatever).

In particular, changing the 'nesting' structure if you have hundreds of playlists is very tedious when you can only grab and move one at a time.

Additionally, being able to view playlists in a more flexible way (i.e. as with files in Windows Explorer, say, not just as a one-dimensional list) would also make manipulating them easier.

[Have to say in lots of other ways I'm finding MM's interface to be more logical and much easier to use than iTunes (e.g. the 'forward' and 'back' buttons are a nice feature), but this annoyance seems, as far as I can tell, to be one common to both]
nohitter151
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by nohitter151 »

I think the problem in this case is, what do you show in the main track window when more than one playlist is selected? It could cause confusion for users.
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rivorson
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by rivorson »

I think the standard behaviour for multi-select enabled lists is single click to select and double click to open, but that breaks double click to play. It could be possible to introduce a temporary multi-select mode specifically for playlist management, essentially the same way that the Android app allows multi-select of tracks and switches back to single select once an action is taken.

A bigger problem would be handling a mixed selection of playlists, collections, and other elements since they are all part of the same tree object but would need to be treated differently. It would make sense to select multiple playlists to move them as a group, and to select multiple collections and to select multiple collections to move them as a group, but what happens when the user tries to move a playlist, a collection, and a sub node together?
MMFrLife
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by MMFrLife »

rivorson wrote:I think the standard behaviour for multi-select enabled lists is single click to select and double click to open, but that breaks double click to play.
Hey, rivorson.
Can you expand on what you mean by how double clicking in the tree to open breaks the double click to play?
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rivorson
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by rivorson »

MMFrLife wrote: Can you expand on what you mean by how double clicking in the tree to open breaks the double click to play?
Yes I can. Currently if you single click on a playlist in the media tree MM displays the contents in the main window. Double clicking on the playlist plays the tracks in that playlist.

If the media tree was a multi-select tree then you don't want every selection change to actually open in the main window so a single click would highlight the playlist in the tree but not change the contents displayed in the main window. You still need to be able to open the playlist to view the contents so that gets assigned to double click, and you don't want to play the entire playlist every time you look at the contents so double clicking on the playlist in the tree would not play the contents.

Double clicking in the main window wouldn't be affected, and you'd still be able to play a playlist from the tree by right clicking and selecting one of the play options.

I hope that's more clear.
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by MMFrLife »

I thought the OP and frankenpod are simply talking about moving the playlists around in the playlist tree structure, not playing
anything.

Currently, if you want to move a playlist to another group or sub group, an entire group to another group or an entire
group and some playlists, you can only select and move them one at a time. But if you could hold down control and select
multiple lists/groups one at a time (not multi-select grab) it would be less tedious to organize
if you have tons of playlists.

The problem of file list population would still be an issue. But would it be possible to code it so that when you select the initial
playlist it populates, then when you select the second one it populates by tacking on to the end of the first one and so on through the selection
process? It wouldn't populate too fast because it wouldn't be a grab, rather a one-at-a-time multi-select. Also, holding control down while selecting
would allow you to open a group along the way without losing any previous selections.
Last edited by MMFrLife on Fri May 29, 2015 12:38 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Lowlander
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by Lowlander »

The ability to select multiple Playlists has been requested before. For me if the Filelisting shows no files (instead a message multiple Playlists selected) it wouldn't be a problem.
frankenpod
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by frankenpod »

nohitter151 wrote:I think the problem in this case is, what do you show in the main track window when more than one playlist is selected? It could cause confusion for users.
I would have thought the simplest thing would be to just display the text "multiple playlists selected" (or "multiple items selected") and not show anything else in that window, unless only one item is selected. I don't need to see the contents of all the selected playlists at once, all I need to know is the names of the playlists at this point, I'm not doing any manipulation at a lower level than playlists as an entity - I just need to move them all (or delete them all, or whatever).

(Ha, lowlander just said the same thing, as I was typing that!)

Alternatively, maybe there could be an entirely separate "playlist manager" plug-in that lets you do stuff with playlists, perhaps treating them much as nested folders in a conventional file-manager.

It is tedious to have a couple of hundred playlists imported from iTunes (all iTunes's nesting seems to be removed in the import process - and getting them organised in iTunes was painful enough as it has the exact same problem), and all just dumped, flat, into one "iTunes" playlist node, and then you have to re-organise them, one at a time, on an awkward slowly vertically scrolling 1dimensional list view.

I remember having very similar problems organising bookmarks in some browsers. Seems to me that the traditional 2-dimensional area containing nested files and folders is the best way to do this sort of thing, its puzzling why so many programs try to reinvent it, with awkward results.
MMFrLife
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by MMFrLife »

I like the message idea! :)
Although, it would be nice to have it populate as an option, to be able to quickly combine multiple playlists for playing or working with from
the file list.
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rivorson
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by rivorson »

If you're displaying the contents of all selected playlists and you select different types of playlist (e.g. a music playlist and a video playlist) with different columns, which columns do you show?

Also, if a track appears in two selected playlists do you show the track twice or do you remove duplicates?
MMFrLife
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by MMFrLife »

rivorson wrote:If you're displaying the contents of all selected playlists and you select different types of playlist (e.g. a music playlist and a video playlist) with different columns, which columns do you show?
Maybe you have it switch to a default column choice and sequence upon the second selection, disallowing any previously customized state.
When you are done and all is unselected, it reverts back to the previous customized state.
rivorson wrote:Also, if a track appears in two selected playlists do you show the track twice or do you remove duplicates?
That's a good question, something to think about.
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MMFrLife
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by MMFrLife »

MMFrLife wrote:Although, it would be nice to have it populate as an option, to be able to quickly combine multiple playlists for playing or working with from the file list.
rivorson wrote:Also, if a track appears in two selected playlists do you show the track twice or do you remove duplicates?
MMFrLife wrote:That's a good question, something to think about.
I guess I would have it remove the duplicates since you are working with the combined playlists as if it were either it's own big new one or
could be custom edited to create multiple new lists from a single source (including, duplicating any single file to a new playlist, if desired, by moving files to
Now Playing from the file list). The problem is that removing duplicates from the combined list might also remove them from their respective playlist.
If the control > mult-selection file list could somehow disallow this, only allowing files to be removed cosmetically (like a "remove from File List only" dialog),
it could work. However, this would probably be too much of a coding headache, if even possible, to implement. :(
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Lowlander
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Re: ability to manipulate playlists as objects

Post by Lowlander »

The SQL of my AutoPlaylists is complex as is, I'd be worried about even worse performance if MediaMonkey has to combine multiple Playlists. I won't vote against an option though.
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