Bugzilla – Bug 825
per-user profiles
Last modified: 2009-07-30 14:02:07 UTC
It would be nice to have the ability to use different named profiles for different users. A particular player could be pinned to a particular user, or have a selection option of which user is currently controlling it. Each user could then have their own personalized playlists, and will be handled as a seperate account for song tracking plugins (moodlogic, musicmagic, audioscrobler, etc). This would probably tie in with whatever per-user framework is needed for bug 437.
I'd like to extend the concept to multiple libraries. For one (I'm sure there's an enhancement request about this) being able to specify multiple music folder paths instead of having to symlink everything would be nice in itself. But the perfect solution would be to have multiple stackable named sources, something like: source1 = file:///mnt/Music/general source1-name = Music for all tastes source2 = file:///mnt/Music/kids/alice/ source2-name = Alice's yucky boybands source3 = itunes:[itunes url here] source2-name = Bob's iTunes share source4 = file:///mnt/Music/x-mas/ source4-name = Christmas carols Then have a list of checkboxes in the player settings where one can (un)check the music sources one wants to use at any given time. Naturally this should tie-in nicely to a multi user module (just put it in user specific settings and have a default user per player). All checked sources should be merged flat as far as slimserver is concerned. This would 1) integrate multiple music sources nicely 2) remove the need to do the most basic classification with genre tags (someone had Classical, Spoken and Christmas IIRC) 3) save people from getting other family members' music in browse, searches and (!) the new random plugin. C.
For that matter, per-user profiles could lead to per-user "ratings", which could do much of what's described above without even needing to segregate the underlying filesystem layout (or in addition to).
I like the suggestion. I think there have been various calls for enhancements to do with user settings and multiple music databases. These were all postponed until the SQL database was established and stable. A menu option could be added to the Squeezebox Settings to select the desired profile. This state should be retained per-player until changed (ie. setting value would survive following device reset). The profile would determine the music sources to use, and other settings, such as screensaver, now playing display mode, etc. Nb. these could be general profiles rather than user settings. eg. I would configure a "late night" profile, which has the display dull or completely blank, and would only contain ambient music, and a daytime profile that would have a bright display with animated display and allow selection of all music sources. It would be nice to have automatic scheduling of these profiles to. eg. so that the squeezebox in my bedroom could be configured to enter "late night" profile mode automatically between the hours 11pm-7am. This would allow my non-techy significant other to be able to sleep without the SqueezeBox keeping the bedroom lit up! It might need not-per-profile settings to configure whether there would be a current playlist per player or per user setting. Per-user would be great. I could be playing tracks in the lounge, then go upstairs and select the same profile and it would pick up that playlist, without having to save it and reselect it. However, some users may prefer it if the current playlist was retained and continued playing when switching profiles.
Marking items that aren't going to be addressed immediately in 6.1 as future. Please update if this is in error or the bug has already been addressed.
see also bug 4528
A target! This would be huge. Well worthy of a version 8.0 label.
See my comments (4 feb 2009) in the forum: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=392490#post392490