[bongo-devel] Re: Bongo marking and selecting random tracks

[Anthony Chaumas-Pellet]

Hello,

Thanks for your answer! Before I get to the 'meat' of the mail, did
you catch the discussion about random-playback-mode picking the track
being played? I'd raised that point because I thought it was connected
with marked tracks and I'm not sure if you picked up that bit.
Daniel's second message in this thread has the info, and this problem
is basically unrelated to the handling of random marked tracks.

> If marks are to be used to select the tracks that will be played,
> they lose their normal function, which is to select tracks for
> performing commands on.

As a pretty much regular user, I found this use of marks to be quite
intuitive (actually a lot more straightforward than in most other
players I know of). In my naive view, I also expected tracks to affect
whether a given track is played.

This particular behaviour of tracks might be worth handling through a
variable, if I am indeed not the only user who would like to use marks
that way. Of course, it will add some complexity, and I'm not
the one who has to struggle with the code afterwards. ;)

> Maybe we could have several different kinds of marks ---
> process marks, play marks, don't play marks, and so on.

I agree. In particular, I think play/don't play marks should be
handled through a generic 'reverse marks' function (I don't expect
that one to come up too often, though).

> But to side-step this complexity, I'm inclined to suggest
> instead creating a new playlist containing only the tracks
> you want to play.
> 
> Creating playlist and library buffers should be easier.
> Bongo is a buffer-oriented media player, after all. :-)
> 
> So we should add a command that takes the marked tracks and
> makes a new playlist out of them.  I have been planning to
> put such a command on `o' (for `open').

I know I prefer using as few buffers as possible (I don't use library
buffers) myself. Still, I like your idea, so long as the added buffers
don't become too intrusive; one buffer per track just wouldn't be fun.

With extra playlists around, "slices" of tracks might be interesting
to create permanent selections of specific tracks (say, the whole of
an album, or the "I've had a bad day" special"). This could be done
more cleanly than with a lot of marking/unmarking.

> Please grab the patch I just recorded and try this code.

Unless I've forgotten to load some part of the code, your patch
appends the marked tracks in the same buffer, leaving me with a new,
but empty playlist. In the code I'm having for enqueuing, there
doesn't seem to be a variable for the target buffer. I don't have
enough time to really give it a thorough look, though.

> Given that we are planning to add intra-playlist queues, it would
> make sense to have intra-playlist play masks --- if it is desirable,
> we can think about how it should work.

> Perhaps during random playback, we should play only the tracks that
> appear in the intra-playlist queue. (We could omit the queue index
> numerals in random playback mode.)

I'm not sure I understand how these features will work. I assume
intra-playlist queues are 'Play foo, then bar, then baz, then foo some
more', but I don't see what 'play masks' are ('never, ever, play that
track?').