Context menu playlist improvements

[koonkii]

Hey there,

There could be some improvements on the ease of use when adding/removing tracks from playlists.

When right clicking on a track, it would be great if we could

* see which playlists the track is already on (shown via a tick or something)
* be able to remove a song from the playlist if ticked
* potentially do it without the need of holding ctrl

These would resolve my main gripe with using MusicBee. Everything else is pretty sweet

From what I can see, the plugin APIs let me query playlist information but theres only one function to add menu items, nothing to do with tweaking existing ones.

[phred]

When right clicking on a track, it would be great if we could
* see which playlists the track is already on (shown via a tick or something)

Right click on track > search > locate in playlist. Note that depending how many playlists you have it could take a few seconds for the results to populate. And if you have a lot of auto-playlists, it may take longer.

* be able to remove a song from the playlist if ticked

Right-click on track > remove > chose to remove from playlist only or remove from playlist and delete the file.

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

(and jinx, phred!)

* see which playlists the track is already on (shown via a tick or something)

There is a Playlists column, which I believe will list all static playlists that a track is in.

You can also right click on any track and so to Search > Locate in Playlist. You have to give it a moment sometimes, but it will show all playlists including auto-playlists that the track is in.

* be able to remove a song from the playlist if ticked
* potentially do it without the need of holding ctrl

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

[koonkii]

Hey psychoadept and phred, thanks for highlighting those columns and menus for me.

While "Search > Locate in Playlist > Playlist X" does indeed show me which playlists it exists in, this is not user friendly.
Why? Because I am still able to click on a playlist that it already exists in and will get a popup confirming the action (it disturbs the action even while holding Ctrl)


Being able to remove a track from the playlist from the "add to playlist" menu would greatly simplify the flow of "Search > Locate in Playlist > Playlist X > Remove track > Go back to previous playlist to resume what I was doing". It's clunky.

Displaying the playlist column works, but very quickly gets squished out with multiple playlists or long names.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

Sure. Say for example I want to quickly manage which playlists a song is on.

(see picture below for initial state of example)

* Right click on track
* Open up the "Add to playlist" menu
* Holding Ctrl, click on "Easy listening" will add it to easy listening and then tick that playlist so it clearly shows the user the track has been added to the playlist
* Holding control maintains current "menu stays open after click" behaviour
* While still holding Ctrl, click on "Upbeat" which will toggle/remove the track from that playlist and untick the menu item (rather than try to add it to the playlist again and require a confirmation modal)

Of course, this will likely require renaming of the "Add to playlist" menu to something else more appropriate.



Hopefully this doesn't sound too absurd. It's just things I noticed when I was going through my 1000 song library to organise into playlists.
I felt the UI was clunky and difficult to use for that task.
There are established UI features MusicBee can make use of to make information and playlist menu UX much nicer to use.

eg. Clicking ticked menu items will toggle the setting