Hi,
I looked through the UI gallery to see if there are any layouts that feature two independent playlist panes, but couldn't find any. By playing around with one of the themes I downloaded, I created a mock-up of the interface I want:


Here, the bottom pane duplicates the top pane -- they always show the same playlist. I want them to be independent, so that I could drag+drop between playlists. Ideally, I'd like to have a flexible two-pane layout where one pane would combine playlist tabs + search results, and another tabbed pane would be able to display an independent set of playlists.

Is there a pre-defined theme that would accomplish this? Or if not, could you give me some pointers on how it could be done?

Having two independent playlist views in the Default UI is not possible at the moment.

It might be possible using panels UI. I can't say for sure though.

This can be achieved using two "Single Column Playlists"!

These can be configured to each show one defined playlist (in each playlist's right-click-menu)...


It's kind of tricky, because it doesn't really work good...
In my Layout, I have a tab named "DJ mode" containing two SC Playlists. The one on the right shows my collection, the one on the left is for queueing songs (this is the playing playlist). I configured these playlists so that middle-clicking a song in my library appends it to the "queue" playlist...

However, these 2 SC playlists do interfere with other playlists in other tabs, wo I wouldn't recommend it...


Perhaps, some day there will be a component available for these kind of playlists, so they're kind of seperate...



NinjaN

Ok, this is kind of like what I want. Can you walk me thru how to set this up (post the format strings or whatever)... Or just give me a link to a good tutorial on how to customize the UI?

As an aside, I'm really surprised that such a component doesn't exist. Having symmetrical but independent panes for easy dragging/dropping of objects is an old and proven UI idiom (if anyone here is old enough to remember the DOS Norton Commander, you'll know what I mean ) and it's just something that would make a lot of sense from ease-of-use standponit. How hard would it be to write a component like that?

I would vote for it to be implemented in the future too!...
It would simplify things a lot for my needs

Personally, I don't quite understand why you would need 2 playlists. If you want to add something to a playlist, 99.9% of the time it makes more sense for the source tracks to come from the media library, not another playlist.

Viewing 2 playlists obfuscates things quite a bit, anyways. Which playlist is playing? which playlist do Library viewers update? Which playlist does the playlist manager update? Which album art gets shown? etc.

I guess if you want to be able to drag and drop an arrangement of tracks that can't be realized by a metadata pattern (like in present ML viewers), the best solution would be something like winamp currently has, where you can view playlists inside of the media library. But of course, foobar has no standard media library GUI, so that's not really possible. I guess that's the difference between a media player that is library-based, that happens to have a playlist (e.g. Winamp (especially with the Bento skin), iTunes, etc), and one that is playlist-based and happens to have a library (i.e. foobar).

[edit] Wow, I used a lot of latin phrases there, lol.

To me personally, playlist-based design is more convenient, that's why I use foobar. I don't like dealing with a large, messy library -- that's why I always create a fair amount of playlists. That is exactly the reason why I want to be able to drag and drop b/w two playlists -- for me, in many cases, the songs that I want are already in a playlist, so if I want to put them in another playlist, I don't want to have to sort through the library to get to them.

Having two playlists displaying side by side shouldn't be hard from the design perspective. After all, the playlist is just a list of files, that's all. If you start playing the song within a playlist, it becomes active and album art, etc, becomes tied to that playlist.