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[Doberman]

I've posted this request back in the "DJ Requests" thread for v14 (which we need to get updated and brought over here for v15, I suppose.) but never had any dev response.

I'd like to have the option of somehow highlighting tracks in my Library pane when they've been added to the current Playing Now list.  The actual currently playing track is bolded, which is great.  But I need a little more for the rest of the stuff in the list.  Colored, italicized, column/field with a checkmark, whatever.  Something. 

Sure, I can scroll the Playing Now list back up and check the titles, but when you've got 20 seconds to get the next tune queued up and you're speed-reading the Library, it'd be a LOT easier to have a visual clue as to what's already up there so you don't repeat.   And I actually think this feature would be useful beyond us DJ's who might be playing a five hour set and have some memory issues.     

As far as I know, MC doesn't have this capability.  The suggestion to have a custom Library view that didn't display any tracks which are in Playing Now is a kludge that would be helpful in certain circumstances, but isn't nearly as useful to me as my request would be.

Thanks for any consideration.

[Matt]

Would an expression (which could be used in an expression column) work?

Something like IsInPlayingNow(...) maybe?

[Doberman]

I haven't delved too far into the expression coding stuff.  If I can display the result as a "Y" or "N" or a little flag in an expression column for the ones that return a Yes or something, yeah that'd work fine. 

Not quite as cool & visually neat as color coding, but it'd do the job quite well. 

For me, all I'd really need to know was if it was in the "Playing Now" pane at all.  Which Zone it's in isn't that important.  Donno if that'd be something anyone else would like to see though.

Thanks for taking the time to think about it.  Even more thanks if it gets added eventually. 

 

[rick.ca]

Something like IsInPlayingNow(...) maybe?

I just spent 30 minutes reminding myself there's no way to use the internal playlistid value to do something like this.

It occurred to me, of course, displaying a flag would be almost as good as highlighting. It would also be more versatile. It could used to also display Last Played (perhaps just the time) in the same column, or to also test that to include items "recently in Playing Now" (so it includes items that may have been cleared from PN). So I think that a good solution.

Highlighting should be considered as a separate feature. We discussed this at some length here. Any reasonable implementation of that idea would allow highlighting based on a smartlist. That means it would be possible to highlight items in PN using IsInPlayingNow(...).

[MusicHawk]

A couple of ideas used in IBM Lotus Notes views could be helpful in MC views to meet a variety of needs:

ROW FORMATTING: Allow a row expression to determine the color/font size/bold/etc of the row. Colors and fonts are expressed as simple codes (colors as RGB). In Lotus Notes, an expression for this purpose is put into a column that does the computation but is otherwise hidden (columns can be hidden yet still be active in the view). Or, there could be a separate row-level expression option that doesn't need to live in a column.

ROW ICON: Allow a column expression to display a suitably-sized arbitrary icon image. The expression contains the path to the icon, and computes the icon file name. (Several ways to vary this, such as allowing only a .gif, or using a fixed set of icons similar to this BBS, or storing a fixed path somewhere else, or referring to icons by number rather than full file name...)

[Matt]

Coming in build 34:
NEW: Added expression functions IsPlaying() and IsInPlayingNow().

Be aware that the functions checks all zones.

So once the build is available, you could add an expression column by right-clicking any column header and use an expression like this:
If(IsInPlayingNow(), * In Playing Now *, )

You could select all files in Playing Now in any list by pressing F3, using this search, and pressing 'Find All':
[=IsInPlayingNow()]=1

[Doberman]

Awesome Matt, thank you very much!

Between this and Locked Views (even if they're a little buggy still), half of my short wishlist that'd make things slicker for me as a DJ have been fulfilled.  And these were the two major ones.