Playlist columns

[jolene_s]

This is just as much of a bug report as it is a feature request…

Basically, there is a VERY OLD problem in VLC regarding the column widths in the playlist. They don't make any sense at all! And I've had limited to no success getting any customization of the columns to be persistent after a relaunch (or reboot).

Far more often than any typical or regular user I get a new hard drive and install a fresh, clean copy of the operating system—this is a regular thing for me. So, I have a lot of experience with the initial default behavior of apps when they're first installed with no possibility of prior, lingering settings or configurations. And the "default" configuration/layout of the the playlist in VLC is utterly absurd and makes NO sense! And despite what people have said about customizing the columns, their order and width; these adjustments do not get saved or loaded properly.

For one thing: the track # column can't even be adjusted and it's FAR too wide! Who has ever seen any album or "tracked media" with millions of tracks? That unadjustable column width is more than wide enough to accommodate for that many digits.

And by default, the "duration/length" column is also always WAY to wide! Most media tracks measure in minutes, although double digits are not uncommon, tracks longer than an hour are much less common and quite frankly should have been split up into more manageable chunks (but this is often not done because of limitations of various media container formats, or implementations of their features in widely available hardware devices. For instance, the inability of most mp3 players to generate gapless playback of tracks results in long tracks from DJs, etc.) In any case, the width of this column is by default sufficient for tracks with a duration of weeks, months or years!

The "Title" and "Author/Artist" columns on the other hand are always too narrow by default to display even one character!

I have no idea whether these widths are somehow encoded in the app. But one way or another, the same widths keep appearing for fresh installations of VLC over and over again. So, there is something in the code about how the column widths are calculated or what their default setting is because it is not totally random, and it is certainly not based on the width of tag data of the track(s) loaded.

I think it's fairly obvious to most anyone that the most logical and ideal situation would be for VLC to evaluate the content of the tags for the file(s) that launched VLC and adjust the columns to display the data in those tags— or if there are not tags, then the columns widths should adjust to accommodate for the duration and the inferred title based on the file name.

This does not seem like an unreasonable request to me.


And BTW, my experience of multiple, regular installations of just one platform/operating systems—this includes Windows, Mac and a couple of linux-based flavors. The playlist in VLC misbehaves similarly on all platforms!

[dajazzeehoo]

VLC for Windows
I searched for this suggestion but to my surprise could not find it.
Currently, "Title" is always the first column in the Playlist.
The rest of the columns can be moved in front of or in back of each other, but Title is always the first column.
I usually play music by first considering genre, and then maybe artist, so I'd love to see a change to VLC that allows any category to be the first column.