GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 571970
Option to randomly populate the play queue from a play list
Last modified: 2009-03-09 10:57:45 UTC
Currently, the Play Queue in Banshee is rather static. We can add some tracks to it and as soon as they all has finished playing we need to do it again. It would be great if the Play Queue could be automatically populated from a play list (or the entire library). This way the user could just specify the play list she wants to listen to and enjoy the music non-stop through the entire day. Attached is a screen-shot of how this feature looks like in iTunes. iTunes also allows to specify the number of upcoming songs to be shown in the Play Queue as well as the number of songs that have already been played (the latter feature is filed as bug 553399).
Created attachment 128817 [details] Screen-shot of the Play Queue in iTunes iTunes allows to specify the source (a play list of the entire library) of tracks to be added to the queue. It also has options for the number of upcoming and played songs.
I've been thinking quite a bit about the concept of a play queue recently, and this bug report seems like an appropriate place to share my thoughts. There is always *something* in the queue, with the exception of a few specific scenarios (the user chooses to stop playback when the song finishes, or the last item in a list finishes and repeat is turned off). This means that the actual queue of what Banshee is going to play next has items in it whether the user added those items or not. My idea, then, is that the Play Queue list should reflect the music that is actually in the queue. This would also include anything the computer adds, which could maybe be shown with a lighter gray text instead of the black text used to show songs that the user added to the queue. This would also clear up some confusion with the question, "Now where is Banshee going to start playing once the songs I added to the Play Queue are finished?" Of course anything the user manually adds to the Play Queue would automatically come before anything automatically generated by the computer. The source of upcoming music could be changed from within the Play Queue list (as this bug report suggests with the reference to iTunes' Party Shuffle). If your Music Library (or whatever your source of upcoming music) was set to shuffle, this would essentially "randomly populate the play queue" as this bug report requests. ...and maybe all of these ideas are bad, but I think it would at least be something worth thinking about.
Bug 565767 is very similar to this one. I will close this one as the patch in bug 565767 is not the final solution to the problem. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 565767 ***
(In reply to comment #2) > I've been thinking quite a bit about the concept of a play queue recently, and > this bug report seems like an appropriate place to share my thoughts. > Michael, could you open a new bug report for this?