Playlist flaws

[Shogun]

I am not trying to raise RealAudio Jukebox up over Winamp, but it does have some great features, like the sub-directories organized by artist and album. I would much prefer this to Winamp's display-every-stinking-song-on-your-hard-drive-on-the-same-list idea. This feature would really come in handy when you have thousands of songs by hundreds of artists. Instead of scrolling down, down, down until you find the artist and song you want. http://forums.winamp.com/ubb/mad.gif

[ilikeoranges]

i completely agree! i do like some of the features that realjukebox has, such as actually setting up a jokebox of sorts. i'm no fan of companies that sucker you in with a free product and then ask $$ for the upgrade. the internet should be free. but it does have some nice features in mp3 playlist sorting and i'd like to see winamp take some of those and make them better!! winamp kicks ass!

[jelloman]

On the other hand i like the simplicity of winamp's playlist compared to other mp3 software.

Well i'll use my roommate and i as an example. I keep all my mp3s in separate folders on my HD, categorized by artist and album. He on the other hand throws all his mp3s into one big folder. I think most people fall into the latter category but i may be wrong. Well, I think true user-friendliness means accomodating both types of people, so i propose two options you can choose between in winamp configuration.

1) Playlist classic mode: everything in the playlist works like it always has. this works better for people like me that keep their music organized...if only i did that for my room http://forums.winamp.com/ubb/smile.gif
2) Playlist advanced mode: The user gives winamp the path to their mp3 folder, it then builds a database of all your music and organizes it automatically using the ID3 tag information. Also a powerful ID3 tag editor needs to be implemented. I think the current one is pretty subpar. To see a very good example of how this should function check out www.freeamp.org (http://www.freeamp.org) and download their player. i was pretty impressed.

[jelloman]

addendum....The most important part is that you get the choice between the two ways of doing it. i actually prefer the way it works now, but i can see why some people would like the "mp3 organization wizard" method better.

[ilikeoranges]

new cool idea in paragraph 2

i agree completely. choice choice choice. i too keep all my mp3s in one dir. (i cant possibly remember where they all are if i put them in subdirectories! i just keep them well organized by name.) and sometimes i like having a single playlist window. i dont like the way realjukebox works either. if one cd comes in as fatboy and another as fat boy, i get two categories, which is understandable, but it's unacceptable to me that rj doesnt let you drag and drop files from one category to another. especially if it cant get the CDDB info or it tries to get a file downloaded from napster. what a nightmare. it does a poor job of categorizing and then doesn't let you move things around! i HATE that! but sometimes you wanna hear moby and you've just downloaded some new ones and saving the current playlist (which should be optionally automatic when a new blank or saved playlist is loaded) and loading the moby playlist and then inserting the new files and then saving THAT playlist can be a pain in the ass. combine that with crappy ID3 tags and you've got a big annoyance on your hands.

!!! here's my latest idea !!! we've talked about having dynamic directories in playlists, and i assume that's going to happen. what i want is along with that a dynamic file pattern that gets applied to the dynamic directory. i'd love to be able to set up a fatboy playlist with one entry, specifying a caps independent "fatboy*" (or maybe even a regexp like "fat ?boy") in my mp3 dir. then when i load the playlist it loads every file matching that pattern and BAM, even if there's new files, it's got them all! i dont need it to be automatic like in realjukebox, i'd just like it to be possible. add a simple or even (optionally of course) automatic save, a playlist refresh, a pulldown playlist load, and i think i'll be all set.

i can just see it now. "yawn, im tired of fatboy." I go to the playlist pulldown menu, select Moby, double click geiss back on and BAM, i'm listening to moby, even the new one i just downloaded on napster!! and my changes to my fatboy list were automatically saved, too!! kickin!@!@

[SkeeK]

The "J" key goes a long way towards helping in this respect, but it would be nicer if you could use it to jump to selected song, but not play it, so you can move files to after the current song. A nice little command for that would be very handy too.