Playlist Navigation Enhancement Requests

[Durwood]

So, I made a little Christmas-music Playlist out of the imported music files in Jukebox. I did find it pretty easy to make the playlist (although I agree with others that a way to import an already-existing playlist would also be nice).

My concerns are with USING the playlist, and navigating through it while it's playing. Having used it quite heavily over the past few days, here are my biggest concerns/comments:

1) On occasion I have had to restart windows or SageTV for one reason or another. It's kind of irritating that there is no way to pick up the playlist where I left off. For instance, if I hit CTRL+Z to put SageTV to sleep, there is no way for me to resume the playlist when I bring SageTV back up.

2) Dovetailing with the above concern, navigation through a playlist is almost nonexistent: the best you can do is move up and down one track at a time, which is actually quite slow (sometimes the clicks "take", sometimes they don't, and the reaction time is pretty slow). If you were halfway through your playlist before you had to suspend, it's extremely painful to find the spot you were in.

3) There is also no feedback indicating how far along you are through a playlist (or through an album; it tells you what track you're on but not how many tracks there are).

I'd really like a way to at the very least, skip by album as well as track.

I'd really LOVE some kind of graphical representation of the whole playlist by album and track, with an indicator of where you currently are, and an ability to just click somewhere else on the playlist to go there.

(At one point, I almost thought I had it; you can bring up the menu from the currently-playing item, and click "Album info", and from there you see that there is a "Next album" button; but that just pulls up the next album info (and I'm not sure what "next" is here: the next in the playlist, or the next in the jukebox?): it doesn't start playing it. Besides, I'd rather have a whole tree of all the items in the playlist so you have an idea of where you are in it.

Since I also use the PVR 350 TV-Out for the OSD, it would also be nice to be able to see some sort of visualization on the 350 (and if we can't see a visualization, then it would be nice to at least see nothing: right now it just shows you whatever TV frame you were last watching before you started playing music, and that can be pretty incongruous at times). But that's really just a generic music jukebox wishlist item, and not a playlist one.

[Opus4]

This isn't nearly everything you are looking for, but the latest beta can use random playback in playlists and you can access playlist entries directly during playback by entering the number of the playlist item & pressing OK/Enter.

- Andy

[Durwood]

Though of course I assume one will have to go to the playlist manager first to remind oneself of what the number of the item actually IS. :-)