playlist necessary? (philosophical)

**crippy** · 10-15-2003, 03:39 AM

This may be a bit philosophical. I've just been searching the internet for a few hours, and it seems like every single mp3 player requires usage of a playlist.

From a user's perspective, it's just an extra pointless step before I can start playing. And if I add new items to a group, the playlist would have to be updated.

Since playlists often don't show the directory structure, finding a song in a long playlist is quite difficult. Imagine I made a playlist of the "warrent buffet investments" containing all the 11 cds and 3000 files, and if I want to start playing from cd-7, track-9, finding the song in playlist is much slower than finding it with explorer. In other words, playlist can be a big nuisance.

I guess from a programming perspective, it's nice to create an index and get more control this way. And indeed even the mp3-cd-players does it at start-up, taking a while to scan through all the directories.

But I imagine it wouldn't be hard to traverse the directories without a master-list. By arranging directories alphabetically, there's only one way to traverse through the directories.

What do people think?

Are there tons of mp3 players not using playlist, just that I don't know about them?

-confused in LA.

**frodobaggins** · 10-15-2003, 04:36 AM

The frodoplayer does not require the use of playlists, files can be traversed in any number of ways, by genre, artist, album, all, directory, etc.

I will however be adding support for playlists, some people like to build custom playlist, favorites, etc.

**crippy** · 10-15-2003, 11:07 AM

just tested it. took 2 mins building 2000 songs. works with chinese characters.

My impression is that instead of playlist, it builds a database, which take even longer. The display of database is not hierarchical, with all the directories compressed, it looks just like a playlist. The "Dir" button doesn't sort by directory, just shows where the database is.

**frodobaggins** · 10-15-2003, 12:19 PM

Originally Posted by crippy

just tested it. took 2 mins building 2000 songs. works with chinese characters.

My impression is that instead of playlist, it builds a database, which take even longer. The display of database is not hierarchical, with all the directories compressed, it looks just like a playlist. The "Dir" button doesn't sort by directory, just shows where the database is.

That thing you looked at was not the frodoplayer, just a test. And the dir function does allow you to choose by directory.

**crippy** · 10-15-2003, 12:57 PM

cool!
it has a large potential. good work.

**PTCruiser** · 10-15-2003, 03:58 PM

test mediacruiser as well.

Doesn't need any playlist! (but you can also use them...)

**crippy** · 10-15-2003, 04:36 PM

Oh Boy, please stop doing this.

If a software has to import files and build a database, it is much worse than using a playlist.

Although I only have 20G of mp3, having to scan the drive is still pretty impractical. Imagine doing that everytime I update new materials, which happens every few weeks.

**PTCruiser** · 10-15-2003, 04:58 PM

@crippy for mediacruiser there's no database or playlist.

You got a browser (and you can open playlist as well)

But the databaseis a good idea I think. Perhaps it must be up to the user to chose tobuild a database or not...

**StangBoyCIC** · 10-15-2003, 05:38 PM

If you load up a winamp playlist with 2000 songs you will see where it comes in handy, with winamp highlighted (active window) you can press "J" on the keyboard and a jump to file box will pop up. From here you can type in the name of the artist, the name of the song, or any of them together, say I was looking for garth brooks's "wild horses". I could type Garth brooks, or wild horses, or "brooks horses wild garth" and it would still come up, you don't even have to finish words, "gar hor wild"

Just make sure its Winamp 2.xx, Winamp 3 sucks, but thats another thread altogether.

I am a die hard Winamp Fan just because of this feature, not bragging but I have about 10,000 songs and trust me there is nothing else that comes close to winamp's Jump feature. Way faster than searching with explorer.

**frodobaggins** · 10-15-2003, 06:22 PM

Originally Posted by crippy

Oh Boy, please stop doing this.

If a software has to import files and build a database, it is much worse than using a playlist.

Although I only have 20G of mp3, having to scan the drive is still pretty impractical. Imagine doing that everytime I update new materials, which happens every few weeks.

Database updating will be built on a schedule that the user chooses, all you will do s tell it a root directory and a schedule.

You just don't understand how powerful a database is for organization. Hell winamp 3 uses an xml database for it's media library.

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