Request window

[Mf]

This is similar to some others.
Me and many others have playlists of entire cd collections (2k+ songs) running on shuffle to give 'continuous tunes'.

It would be nice to have some sort of 'request list' that allows us to 'influence' the shuffle by creating (by drag and drop, right click option or whatever) a separate list of requests to be played next automatically.
So you could place songs on the list and when they are played they disappear.

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Mf

good idea

[hjellec]

I was going to suggest something exactly like this, but instead I'll just say 'Me Too'.

if you look here you'll see another suggestion i made for the playlist...well, i'd like to expand that idea.

ok, imagine this (stay with me here), winamp would have a "music management utility"..instead of just the little playlist box, it is a full fledged window that you can maximize and all. It is divided up into a left side and right side. The left pane keeps a database of all the music in your mp3 folderas i talked about in the above mentioned post. the right pane is the playlist side. there you can enqueue music as expected.

Well, when you set your playlist to random mode, there would be a little area near the top of the window that shows the next song coming up. if you don't like that song there would be a little "X" button next to it that when clicked will put another random song up there. As another feature you could manually click and drag a song up to that box to determine the next song to play. The only difference really is that winamp would figure out what plays next one song in advance. Really easy to implement actually.

This idea could easily be implemented into the current winamp interface as well, without a "music management utility"...just in the normal playlist box there would be a section for "next song" and the rest would go as explained above....

let me know if i make sense, i dunno if i communicated this clearly but in my mind this makes a whole lot of sense and would be GREAT!

How about this:
The playlist is divided in 2 parts:
1.The lower part(the one we already have)
2.The new upper part with space for
the next 5 songs winamp plans to play next.
You could imagine it like in an easy to use ftp-program.You just delete the file You don't want to be played as one of the next 5 or drag and drop others in the 'to-play' space to queue them
(sorting included of course)...

Hhhmmmm ???

[Mf]

yep, that's the sort of thing i was thinking about.

You could even add in an idea i read in another post where you could chose not to have a song next (right click on it in the next 5 list and select 'no, this is pants' or whatever) and winamp would automatically put the next song in the random play sequence in instead.

-=-=-=-

Mf

look at this : http://www.oddsock.org/tools/songrequester

it's not quite what you are looking for, but does some of the stuff mentioned in this thread...

oddsock

better yet, the "next songs" part would be resizable by clicking and dragging on its border, and winamp would show as many "next songs" as could fit when your resize it. that way you could show 1 song or 20 or whatever.

[Ice]

I think that the idea of having some type of special playlist would be real cool. maybe if the random code was a little bit smarter,or a completly different feature, it would remember what you like.

ehh.... yea........ me too!

MusicMatch uses a similar system to what is being suggested here, with a separate 'Music Library' which can be grouped by Artist, Album etc. and sorted by any of these fields. Tracks are then added to the Playlist from this library.

Something like this in WinAmp would be great.

hehe...what about this:
an Icq type deal; Icq has that option which you just click on called ...[insert action lead-in music here]..."to advanced mode"...
Of course this would require winamp to have a few additional windows, but it seems nullsoft finds ways to incorporate everything...remember before they had the avs skin?

[aaron]

i think winamp should have a playlist divided into 3 parts: one UPPER part, where you see the next songs. one LEFT part where you see all artists and one RIGHT part where you see the songs of the activated artists (a bit like windows explorer). you could drag/drop artists or single songs to the UPPER (next songs) window. if you drag an artist, all songs of that artist are added, if you drag a song, just the song. maybe the artists should also be divided into albums, so you can add an entire album very quickly.

aaron

aisotton@libero.it

[chepe]

i really like the original idea of MF!!!!

[Mf]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by aaron:
i think winamp should have a playlist divided into 3 parts: one UPPER part, where you see the next songs. one LEFT part where you see all artists and one RIGHT part where you see the songs of the activated artists (a bit like windows explorer). ....

aaron

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

hmmm...

well, i certainly think it would be nice to be able to expand/contract the playlist by id3 tag fields (artist/genre etc) kinda like the IE history list where it shows you the sites you have visited and clicking on a particular one expands it to show all the pages.
If you wanted to just select a particular artist you could either
- create a new playlist (just by highlighting those you want and selecting crop)
- or you could have winamp shuffle your 'requests' instead of just playing through them linearly

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Mf

me too

That's a great idea! I agree completely. That would be really cool, really useful. I would sell my soul to the devil for such a feature.

[aaron]

sorry mf i think i was not clear enough in my playlist explanation. i meant it this way:
to the left a list of all artists (like directories) with a subdirectory for each of their albums in it. but, unlike in windows explorer, you could not select only a single album or artist, but also more then one. to the right, a list of all songs of the selected artists or albums. i mean, if you selected "album a" and "artist b" on the left side, on the right side you see all songs contained in the "album a" (which may be by any artist) plus all songs of all albums by artist b. the songs which do not belong to any album could bedirectly in the artists album. the upper window is the one where you can set the next playing songs.

aaron
aisotton@inwind.it

Yep - this feature or something similar is something sorely missing in WinAmp for those of us who want WinAmp to be...well, semiautomatic....

Let us influence the playlist!

[Dr Robotnik]

Those ideas sound good but could be confusing to the new user..
what I suggest is something like this:
in the MPEG info box there could be a prefernce slider with 3 different settings (low, normal , high)
all mp3s are normall to start off with but if you change the slider to low then an mp3 will have a less chance of getting played than an mp3 with its slider setting on high.
this would mean no redesinging of the playlist and wouldnt be simple to the eye.

[Mf]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Dr Robotnik:
if you change the slider to low then an mp3 will have a less chance of getting played than an mp3 with its slider setting on high.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Some others have suggested the idea of a probabalistic approach to the random play so it plays your favorites more often. If and when they include ID3v2 tag support (which I believe can include fields for saying which are your favourites) this would be easy to implement. But I for one only have songs that I like in my playlist so plain ol' vanilla random play does me fine - & if I get a song I don't like i just press b (for 'bored now!') & winamp moves on.
Another problem with this is that on random play you'd end up having all your favourite songs first - which would be nice. But then, since each song gets played once you'd end up (well, in all probability) with and hour of all your least favorite songs.

Anyway, that's a little bit off-topic. I'd say that splitting the playlist into 2 panes with one for requests is user friendly enough & they could always turn it off.
Damnit! I want this feature!

thankyou for reading

-=-=--==-=

Mf

Not exactly. I envision it as something like this: a scale of 1 to 10 rates the songs. For every cycle, a song gets played the number of times it is rated, so unpopular songs may or may not get played right away, but prefered songs will be played more often (some kind of algorithm would be needed to keep them from playing too close to each other, i.e. no repeats). Also, a feature so that songs you play manually might have their rating bumpbed up a little automatically. And after time, if you either push past a song, or play it less, its rating declines.

[Xerxes]

This idea of rating songs is very good;
if you just made it so would display the
priority number of the track as a small number beside it. And then right click
the track to change it.

I'm thinking this so we dont have another
firggin window to skin; and render many
great skins "obsolete".

Xerxes

I see [at least] two distinct ideas here:

1) The idea of influencing a playlist's randomness. This is INDIRECT, e.g. play song A more often than others (based on whatever criteria...)

2) The idea of "requesting" songs, without regard for any randomness. This is DIRECT influence, e.g. play song B then C then D [and then return to normal playlist behavior.]

So, if we had BOTH of these things, you could play a really lousy song...that you wanted to hear NOW cause your friends are over and they hate it...and then return to WinAmp's normal "priority random" algorithm . . .

Personally, I want the latter more than the former, but hey, let's ask fer 'em all.

Me too.

I would also like to add another window that would be a list of all your playlists - I'd rather have 1 playlist / author to make managing songs easier.

[JoshV]

How about this. Mood settings. If you feel in a techno mood you tell winamp to random on the techno. each song would have a setting or two. IE. Beastie Boy's Body movin (fatboy slim remix) would be both techno, and dance. (whatever) and if you put it in a "dance mood" then it would play that, it would also enqueue it in the techno mood playlist... get the idea? I hope so.

[Mf]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JoshV:
How about this. Mood settings. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Again, ID3 tags already have some sort of genre settings tag and ID3v2 takes that idea further so it would be pretty easy to implement. The only issue is, who actually fills in those fields in the tags?
I know I can never be bothered.
Does anyone know of a cddb enable ripper/encoder that autofills out all the fields of the ID3 tags?

All in all the ability to influence random play is clearly one that is certainly desired by users.

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Mf

[Ice]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Does anyone know of a cddb enable ripper/encoder that autofills out all the fields of the ID3 tags?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Audiograbber will put in ID3 tags if you specify for it to.

I am real picky about having files named a certain way, and for them all to have id3 tags.. so audio grabber is like my god. it does the hard work of putting in tags for me. :P