I’ve decided against implementing playlists for Ocarina 5, mostly because I don’t use them. I listen to my entire library on shuffle, so the only playlist I ever create is an exact copy of the library. It takes extra work to keep this playlist up to date, especially since I never took the time to easily show the difference between playlists and the library. I usually ended up clearing the entire playlist, and then readding every song from the library. This is unnecessary for how I listen to my music and avoiding the hassle is what Ocarina is all about.
I do plan on spending time bringing some of the benefits of playlists to a library-only world. Ocarina has always had song filtering, but I’ve only ever implemented simple keyword matching with regexes. I think that I should spend time developing better filtering rules. Specifying “artist contains ‘foo’ or artist contains ‘beatles’” directly in the library display would be more useful. I might even try to implement automatic filters for artist, album, genre, and year tags. Saving user defined filters would be useful, too…
