Bugzilla – Bug 5419
Enhance ability to re-sort the Now Playing playlist
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:27:45 UTC
Frequently my family will be listening to a group of songs and will want to divert away from them for a moment but then go back to them. Perhaps we've queued up three albums but a song comes up in conversation that we want to listen to right now, then go back to our albums right where we were. Right now that process is very cumbersome: we would search for the song, add it to the end of the playlist, then go to the web interface and click the "up" button over and over again until it was just underneath the currently playing song. I would like the Now-Playing playlist to have, instead of up/down buttons in the web interface, a text box that lists the its numeric position in the playlist. Then we could edit those numbers, update the playlist, and have it re-sort in the new numeric order we've specified. In the scenario above, if our three albums made a 30-track now playing list, and we were listening to track 5, we would add our new track (#31), change its number 31 to number 6, press Update, and have it be next on the list. The rest of the playlist position numbers would re-count themselves appropriately. You should be able to update the position of more than one track at once, too. Frankly this is much like the way Netflix lets you re-order your queue; it works great and would be ideal for this situation. Further, this could be implemented in the player interface: you could go to a track in your now playing list, press right, scroll through the attributes until you found the playlist position, press right, then punch in the new number with your remote. You'd probably press Right again and the playlist would re-sort. This would necessarily be a one-track-at-a-time operation whereas the web interface should allow many tracks to be re-sorted at once, but this would still be much much more flexibility than is currently available in the player. Thanks for considering.
The new 7.0 web UI allows drag-and-drop reordering of the playlist. Give it a try!
I finally have SqueezeCenter, and while the new interface is vastly improved, there are still three things that would be greatly improved by having a Netflix-like number system. 1 - When I add a new track and want to make it first, I can certainly drag it upwards. But the behavior seems to be inconsisten. Once in a great while, dragging it upwards will move the list upwards, but usually it doesn't. Instead, I have to drag it to the top of the currently displayed songs, use the scroll bar to advance the list, drag it to the top, repeat. To move a tune to be the next song playing with a decent-sized playlist I had to do 25 mouse movements! 2 - This only helps with one track at a time. With the numbered list I would be able to change the order of any number of tracks. 3- The drag and drop doesn't help at all from the player interface. From the player I could only do one track at a time, but I envision that you could press right, scroll down until you find "Position in Playlist" or something, go right again, then select "change position in playlist," then key in a new number An alternative for the new Duet system would be to somehow select a track, then as you scroll up or down in the playlist you'd actually be dragging the track along with you. For that matter, that could be done with the old system as well, maybe instead of keying in a number. This is still an enhancement I'd really like to see.
Changing target to Future > Enhancement