[mythtv-users] family acceptance test.

[R. G. Newbury]

On 08/13/2015 07:33 AM, Roger Siddons wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 03:28:11 +0100, Phill Edwards
> <philledwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         Personally I *hate* playlists, but I could handle making a one
>         item playlist, if I could ever figure out how to make one, and
>         then play the damn thing. I have lots of music archived, and
>         have NEVER found a player which I like. All have failed in the
>         UI. Maybe mythmusic wouldn't be so bad, but since I quite
>         literally cannot get a single piece to play using it, I do not know.

That was me, Geoff, quoted by Phill

> Totally agree. You don't have to create playlists.
>
> The "playlist" term is a confusion between:
>
> 1. "THE playlist", as in "the list of tracks that are currently
> playing/queued to play", and
> 2. "A playlist", as in "a specific order of favourite tracks that you
> assemble and save to replay later".
>
> Consequently you get a "Playlist Options" dialog with options to "Save
> to New Playlist" (2) & "Save To Existing Playlist" (1?).

Which is quite confusing when you do not *want* a 'playlist' you want to 
play the  bloody piece of music and are getting more and more irritated 
by the second!


> I'm not a big user of music apps but IMHO this seems to bedevil all of
> them. They can circumvent the issue by UI design (layout, menubars,
> tooltips), which MythMusic cannot use. It has the (severe) restriction
> of using only buttonlists & dialogs, so terminology becomes crucial.
>
> I wonder if introducing a new term for (1) would resolve some confusion.
> What's a standard, intuitive term for the "Now playing list" ?

The 'Active Queue'.  'A playlist' as a term, should be restricted to a 
list of pieces, or aggregation of pieces which will be played, in turn, 
when the playlist is put into the queue.
while read line-item; do play $line-item; done < playlist

The Active Queue should be set up so that it *may* have more than one 
item, but it always plays the first/top item *now*, and the actual queue 
is a temporary list.

> An alternative (more accurate) perception is that MythMusic always plays
> a playlist, but it will automatically create one from an album and then
> throw it away afterwards. However I wouldn't say that's intuitive...

Definitely NOT intuitive, because you *always*, it appears have to 
select an album,,,

>
> I always play albums.

And I almost never do, which is why the present method absolutely 
skunked me. You basically cannot play single pieces.


> 1. Main Menu/Music/Select Music
>
> 2. Go down to Albums, then go right to the album list. (Going into the
> tree via the Artist/Genre filters reduces the album list significantly
> but is extra button presses!)
>
> 3. Go up/down to your preferred album and select/click it (OK, Space,
> Return etc)
>
> 4. Choose "Replace Tracks" from dialog ("Add Tracks" will queue it to
> play when current album finishes)

Completely non-intuitive design. "Replace Tracks"???? Replace *what*? I 
didn't have any tracks to replace..... So I never tried doing that, and 
presing 'Play'. It did not appear to go where I wanted to go.

Thank you. Roger. You have actually explained how to make the POS work. 
I will now recompile and see if I can actually play some music. I took 
mythmusic out of the configure script some time ago, as *mythmusic was 
totally useless to me*.


> 5. It plays the album, I listen.
>
> Selecting individual tracks doesn't start them playing automatically but
> moving right to the Playlist (1) and selecting the track (OK, return,
> "P"/Play etc) does.

I will try this. As I was saying about non-intuitive design.....
In effect, mythmusic is designed to only let you play albums... without 
extreme extra effort.

No wonder I could not get it to play anything. I had never properly 
selected any single item. (And when it started playing the first track 
of an album, I had NO f****ing idea why.

> If that doesn't work for you then a precise description of the problem
> would probably elicit a quick response.

Well it didn't a couple of years ago, but I think you have now provided 
the answer.

> I'm using 0.28 but I believe all MythMusic patches go into 0.27/fixes.
>
> FWIW: If your confusion lies more navigating the "Scrolling Button
> Filter Tree" UI used by MythMusic then I'd recommend playing with it in
> the MythCenter theme. Although the others look good, they do seem to
> obscure the way it works, to my eye.

I am using Mythcenter-Wide.

Thanks again Roger.

Geoff