[Feedback] ampache and random play

xian sent a message using the contact form at  
http://amarok.kde.org/en/contact.

First off awesome work everyone. Thanks!

For amarok 2, I've seen reference to remote services being treated as first  
class citizens. I'm using the ampache plugin to access my music from home  
while at work. It's pretty cool and lets me leave my ipod at home, but if I  
seem unable to do random play.

Maybe it's just me, but I have a work flow of letting random songs play and  
just hit next if it's something I don't want. Point being I can drag songs  
and artists from the ampache service to my playlist, but I don't think I'm  
able to let random play populate the playlist for me. Is there the capability  
to do this? Or any plan to add it? Seem like the random play stuff only works  
for collections. Is this right?

Thanks much,
Christian

Report as inappropriate:  
http://amarok.kde.org/en/mollom/contact/cd4ff3044ba940b1
_______________________________________________
Amarok mailing list
Amarok@...
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok

Random/dynamic playlists only work with the local collection right
now. They can in theory work with any queryable collection, but
support for that isn't there yet, maily because: (1) doing a lot huge
queries (which dynamic playlists do) on something like ampache may be
very slow (2) there needs to be a conveniant way to include/exclude
collections from a dynamic playlist. There are also some more
technical issues I won't go into...

So, not right now, maybe in the future.

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 7:56 PM,  <mchugh19@...> wrote:

> xian sent a message using the contact form at
> http://amarok.kde.org/en/contact.
>
> First off awesome work everyone. Thanks!
>
> For amarok 2, I've seen reference to remote services being treated as first
> class citizens. I'm using the ampache plugin to access my music from home
> while at work. It's pretty cool and lets me leave my ipod at home, but if I
> seem unable to do random play.
>
> Maybe it's just me, but I have a work flow of letting random songs play and
> just hit next if it's something I don't want. Point being I can drag songs
> and artists from the ampache service to my playlist, but I don't think I'm
> able to let random play populate the playlist for me. Is there the capability
> to do this? Or any plan to add it? Seem like the random play stuff only works
> for collections. Is this right?
>
> Thanks much,
> Christian
>
> Report as inappropriate:
> http://amarok.kde.org/en/mollom/contact/cd4ff3044ba940b1
> _______________________________________________
> Amarok mailing list
> Amarok@...
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok
>

_______________________________________________
Amarok mailing list
Amarok@...
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok

[Benjamin Kleiner]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

On Thursday, 23. October 2008 19:21:04 Daniel Jones wrote:

> Random/dynamic playlists only work with the local collection right

> now. They can in theory work with any queryable collection, but

> support for that isn't there yet, maily because: (1) doing a lot huge

> queries (which dynamic playlists do) on something like ampache may be

> very slow

Why don't you just query once for all entries and then do the selection for the random playlist on a local copy (of the list)?

_______________________________________________
Amarok mailing list
Amarok@...
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok

> Why don't you just query once for all entries and then do the selection for
> the random playlist on a local copy (of the list)?

It does, but its not really so simple. It can't query for tracks,
because that involves storing information about each track which uses
quite a lot of memory on large collections. It instead queries for
unique ids of tracks.

I'm not sure if such an option exists for ampache (maybe it does), but
it may still be slow. Building a random playlist is easy, but building
a playlists with biases can sometimes involve looking at thousands of
tracks. I'm not sure if remote a collection will be fast enough.

I'm not saying its impossible, it just won't be there in 2.0.
_______________________________________________
Amarok mailing list
Amarok@...
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok

[Benjamin Kleiner]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

On Saturday, 25. October 2008 19:45:03 Daniel Jones wrote:

> > Why don't you just query once for all entries and then do the selection

> > for the random playlist on a local copy (of the list)?

>

> It does, but its not really so simple. It can't query for tracks,

> because that involves storing information about each track which uses

> quite a lot of memory on large collections. It instead queries for

> unique ids of tracks.

And caching into an own mysql database/table isn't an option?

> I'm not sure if such an option exists for ampache (maybe it does), but

> it may still be slow. Building a random playlist is easy, but building

> a playlists with biases can sometimes involve looking at thousands of

> tracks. I'm not sure if remote a collection will be fast enough.

Well that's connection dependant. On an 100Mbit-LAN this probably will work fine.

(depends on the exact way of querying, of course. Is there an online readable documentation for ampache anywhere?)

> I'm not saying its impossible, it just won't be there in 2.0.

sure, I wasn't aiming for 2.0 anyway (Dunno about mchugh19)

_______________________________________________
Amarok mailing list
Amarok@...
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok

> And caching into an own mysql database/table isn't an option?

It could be done, but I would really prefer not to have to go that
route as it is a lot more work ( and code to maintain ) than simply
using the relatively simple query API. We do actually cache all the
content info form some services to the local db, but I personally
thing that, even though the API is a work in progress and is not
perfect yet, the ampache approach is much more elegant.

Again though, using Ampache ( and other services ) in dynamic
playlists is something we really want to do as well, its just not a
high t priority at this particular time as we really need to finish up
Amarok 2.0.0

- Nikolaj
_______________________________________________
Amarok mailing list
Amarok@...
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok