0000204: Playlist usability: Users can't distinguish between playlist containers and playlists - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0000204	MMW v4	Playlist / Search	public	2003-03-19 16:02	2024-07-24 00:41

Reporter	rusty	Assigned To
Priority	low	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	always
Status	assigned	Resolution	open

Summary	0000204: Playlist usability: Users can't distinguish between playlist containers and playlists
Description	The current playlist hierarchy has 2 concepts: 1) Playlist containers (similar to folders that contain other playlists) 2) Playlists (similar to files) Currently, though, the UI does not distinguish between these concepts, resulting in: 1) Save/load dialogs that are a bit confusing because they must provide file/folder functionality in the absence of file/folder metaphors/icons. 2) Users are unsure which playlists are containers and which are actual playlists. e.g. if there's a hierarchy as follows: -Hard Rock \| ---Metallica&IronMaiden It's impossible for the user to know if 'Hard Rock' is a playlist, or if it's just a container for other playlists.
Tags	No tags attached.

Fixed in build

jiri 2003-03-20 10:01 administrator ~0000572	Actually there is no difference between these two, any playlist node can contain songs (except for auto-playlists, which contain rather queries than songs). Thus the relation to folder/files structure is like playlist=folder, songs=files in this folder.

rusty 2003-03-20 13:31 administrator ~0000573	I reaize that, but the problem is that the reason for allowing hierarchy here is so that users can create a hierarchy of different classes of playlists, and when they do this there's no way of telling whether a playlist is a container or a actual list. A simple solution would be that whenever the playlist hierarchy is shown, the number of songs contained within is displayed next to each playlist. e.g.: Playlist1 (0) --Playlist2 (55) --Playlist3 (60) --Playlist4 (0) ----Playlist5 (100)

jiri 2003-03-20 13:42 administrator ~0000576	That's quite interesting proposal, it could be useful. The numbers could be shown in all nodes except the main Playlist node. Zeros would be probably better not to show at all. And also this feature could be turned off in options.

rusty 2003-03-20 14:13 administrator ~0000582	Sounds good.

jiri 2003-03-22 09:04 administrator ~0000596	I came to a technical problem here. The retrieving of songs count for auto-playlists could take a long time and thus expanding a node with several (or many) auto-playlists could be very unpleasant experience. I can see two solutions only: do not show the numbers for auto-playlists or do not show the numbers at all. What do you think?

rusty 2003-03-23 00:09 administrator ~0000604	How about not showing the numbers for autoplaylists--this won't be a problem because autoplaylists are always 'real' playlists i.e. they always contain songs and are not used as 'containers'.

rusty 2009-05-22 15:18 administrator ~0017967	More on this at: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=39601

rusty 2016-08-09 15:05 administrator ~0045368	More at http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=85563