Hi there.

At the moment we basically have two play modes:
sequential and shuffle.

I would like to see the ability to add your own play modes.

This could be done in a fairly simple way, I imagine.

Consider this implementation proposal:

There is a directory somewhere (let's call it "playmodes")
where the savvy empeg user can put files.

The player UI looks in this directory and instead of offering
an menu option
shuffle -> on/off
it offers a menu option
playmode -> sequential / shuffle / file1 / file2 / file3 ...
where file1,2,3 are the files found in the playmode directory.

If one of the filex modes is selected, then when the player needs
to decide which tune to play next, it simply runs
"filex currentplaylist currenttune"
(here currentplaylist and currenttune are the fids of these objects).

filex is a program (or script or whatever) that outputs the
fid of the tune to play next.

The advantages of this method are:
- very low cost for empeg to implement, as you can rely on third party
developers (and the users) to implement the actual playmodes
- allows great flexibility
- no UI convenience penalty, if people don't want to use this feature

I would be really happy to have this feature as described above.

Of course, there are some things that would make it nicer, but
they're nowhere near as important as the bits above.

For instance
- I don't mind having to parse the database myself
in order to get the values of specific tags, but it would
be nice to have some API to do that for me.
- It would be nice to be able to script playmodes, rather than
having to compile a program, but this would need the player
to understand the script language. You probably wouldn't want to
bloat the player with that.

Doesn't anyone else think this would be extremely cool?

Richard.