Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Idea: Heirarchical playlist UI (Read 2803 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Idea: Heirarchical playlist UI

With the popularity of formatting strings that group albums together, what if there was a UI plugin that could do this while actually being flexible enough to handle it? What I'm envisioning would be almost exactly like the album list, only more flexible and with the playlist interface. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Code: [Select]
-Spoon
  -(2002) Kill the Moonlight
     01. track 1
     02. track 2
     03. track 3
+Squarepusher
Sunny Day Real Estate - [Diary #4] Round
Alice in Chains - (1992) - Dirt
-Toadies
  -(date) Pleather
     01. track 1
     02. track 2
     03. track 3
  +(date) Album B
  +(date) Album C
  +(date) Album D
And so and so on.

Right-clicking on an upper level (with the +/-) and hitting the context menu would "insert" or "remove" the items under that entry in the playlist, effectively acting like a tree menu currently does, only using the current listbox that the default and Columns UI uses. Double clicking the item plays everything in it, starting with the first track.

Dragging items

This is the tricky part. The way I think it should be done is that bottom level items would become "broken" as they are moved around. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
Code: [Select]
-Artist
  -Album1
    track1
    track2
    track3
  +Album2

Now I were to drag track 2 outside of Album1, it would look like this:
Code: [Select]
-Artist
   Artist - [Album1] track2
  -Album1
     track1
     track3
  +Album2

As you can see, track2 is listed using a top-level formatting string, which I'll get to later. Rearranging the items within an category should have no effect on their formatting, but removing said item from that category will give it a top-level formatting string.

Formatting Strings

Naturally, the formatting would be fully customizable using the traditional TAGZ formatting. Syntax-wise it'd be very similar to the Album List formatting, but with a special field added for the +/-'s, say, %_tree% or something like that. Here's an idea of what the example shown would look like:

Code: [Select]
%_tree% [%artist%]|%_tree% ['('%date%')'] %album%|$num(%tracknumber%,2). %title%


Here's the other part:

Top-Level Formatting

Code: [Select]
[%artist%]|[%artist% - ]['('%date%')' - ][%title%]|[%artist% - ]['['%album%']' - ][%title%]


Each section of this string corresponds to the above string, so that orphaned tree items display the proper data. If you'll refer back to the top of this thread, you'll notice that the single "Sunny Day Real Estate - Round" has different formatting than, say, the album "Alice in Chains - Dirt."

Issues

1. Getting the whole thing to work is obviously going to require some significant programming work. I can't program worth a damn, thus the "idea" part.

2. Performance. I have no idea if the standard listbox is the best solution, but it seems like the most customizable way to do it. If there's a better method I'd like to hear it, because they probably exist...

3. Implementation. Ideally, this would replace the columns part of the Columns UI, but that level of modularity hasn't been implemented yet. Now this is obviously a temporary issue, and I'm sure that it would work fine just have it as a seperate box  or panel for now.

Idea: Heirarchical playlist UI

Reply #1 –
Forgive me for not reading everything you wrote, but is this what you're looking for?

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=29435

edit: let me disclaimer by saying I haven't used foo_playlist_tree, and just skimming the last page of posts in the thread, it doesn't look like it's very stable or recommended.  I guess you can just say that "your idea has been attempted before"

Idea: Heirarchical playlist UI

Reply #2 –
Sort of... I'm talking about full playlist integration though. Like, think of the current way that your playlist works, but add in the ability to expand/collapse artists/albums, then drag them anywhere and integrate seamlessly with everything else.