Bug 232673

Summary: "dislike song" or "not equal" in dynamic playlist to eliminate disliked songs from playlists
Product: [Applications] amarok Reporter: Crypticfortune <gzapz8pnug>
Component: Playlists/Dynamic PlaylistsAssignee: Amarok Developers <amarok-bugs-dist>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: wishlist CC: lfranchi, ralf-engels, tenninjas
Priority: NOR    
Version: 2.3.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Debian testing   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In: 2.4.2
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Crypticfortune 2010-03-30 11:35:00 UTC
Version:           2.3.0 (using KDE 4.3.4)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Debian testing/unstable Packages

For songs I don't like or don't want to hear anymore, I want some way to exclude them from dynamic playlists without removing them from my collection all together (there may come a day when I want to hear that whole album in its entirety, or just that song or something! who knows! Music organization shouldn't be about "deleting"). In Amarok 1.4 I did this by rating the song with 1 star and adding a condition "rating is not 1 star" to a Smart Playlist. Simple and effective. With Amarok 2, the "with ___ equal to" condition is gone and I can't use "match rating greater than .5 stars" or something because that also eliminates unrated songs (which are like 95% of my collection). Technically I could still achieve the same goal with "proportional bias 100% -> match rating with less than 5 stars" and use 5 stars to code "hate song" but this is pretty counterintuitive.

My Amarok 1.4 approach was obvious enough to me but still seems a little hacky. I think there should be some intuitive, coherent way to coordinate these kind of "exclude". iTunes uses "checkboxes" to do the same thing, but to a new user the meaning of a "check" is not exactly a obvious symbol, so I don't like that. My ideal solution would to be to add a "not" to option all of the bias controls in dynamic playlists, and allow filtering based on labels (so I could define my own "dislike" label and say "proportion 100% not labeled with dislike").
Comment 1 tenninjas 2010-07-19 05:27:23 UTC
I can confirm this behavior. Additionally, I tried adding a 'Proportion Bias' which matches say, a genre I wish to exclude, and setting it to zero %. Songs from that genre still appear in the dynamic list. (I'm uncertain if that should be considered a separate bug or if that is the designed behavior, the documentation is very unclear).
Comment 2 Ralf Engels 2011-02-11 17:59:00 UTC
With the new bias (which hopefully get's merged soon) you can make AND (NOT rating == 1)
Or better AND ((NOT rating == 1) AND playcount > 0)
Comment 3 Ralf Engels 2011-05-27 20:10:19 UTC
Dynamic playlist can use the search terms as a bias.
So, if you can formulate a search for disliked songs (which I am pretty sure you can) then you can include or exclude them from the playlist.