Purpose

• Category: Music
• Type of Change:  Feature (Rework)

Description of Change

As of MediaPortal 1.2.0 beta you now have much more control over how music is played.  When you browse your collection you can select items to play right now, or queue them up in the current playlist to play later.   How you interact with your collection is determined by the playlist settings.

There are three ways to playback items from your collection

1. Play button on remote ('p' on keyboard)
2. Enter/OK on remote (enter on keyboard)
3. Various options on the context menu (accessed via via on remote or f9 on keyboard)

Play Button

You are able to press play (or 'p' on keyboard) on any item when browsing your collection and this will 

1. Stop whatever is currently playing (music or not)
2. Clear the current playlist
3. Add all tracks under the selected item to the current playlist
4. Start playback
   The key here is point 3; if you use the default album artist view then you will initially be greeted with an A-Z index page of all album artists.  Pressing play when B is highlighted will queue up every single track that has been imported to your database where the album artist starts with B.  If you press ok/enter when B is highlighted you will be taken to a list of album artists starting with B.  If you highlight Beck from the list and press play then all tracks in your collection by Beck will be added to the playlist.  If however you press enter/ok on Beck you will be taken to a list of his albums in your collection.   Highlighting Mellow Gold and pressing play will play the tracks from that album.  If you press enter/ok on Mellow Gold you will be taken to the track listing for that album.  What happens when you highlight a track and press play depends on the "Add all tracks to playlist" option; if enabled (default setting) then pressing play on a track will add all tracks for that album to the playlist and start playback at the highlighted track.  If disabled then only that single track will be played.

Enter / OK

Enter / OK will generally be used to browse your collection (eg. clicking ok on an album will take you to a list of tracks for that album etc).
Where Enter / OK can be used to playback music is when browsing a list of tracks.  The behavior of this button depends on the playlist mode set in configuration.   By default when browsing a list of tracks Enter / OK will work exactly the same as the play button (ie. it will stop what is playing, clear playlist then based on the "Add all to playlist" option will either play the highlighted or track or play all tracks and start playback with the highlighted one.
In playlist mode Enter / OK will queue up the highlighted track at the end of the current playlist (or all tracks if the "Add all to playlist" option is enabled)
If there is nothing playing when you press enter or what is playing is not music then MediaPortal will check if there are already tracks in the current playlist.  If tracks are found you will prompted as to whether you want to clear the current playlist or whether you want to keep it and add the track you want to play to the end of the existing playlist (playback will start with your selected track)

Context Menu

Brining up the context menu whilst an item is highlighted gives you several options

• Play Now - This is the same as pressing play.   The playlist will be cleared and selection played
• Play Next - This option will insert the selection into the playlist after the current track (eg. if you added an album to the playlist then whilst track 1 is playing select another album and Play Next the whole album you have selected will play and then the original album will restart at track 2
• Add to playlist - This option will add the selection to the end of the playlist

Additional Information and References

[3193|http://mantis.team-mediaportal.com/view.php?id=3193]