the playlist could use the same formatting function as the
> Maybe only display the cover + album title if there are more than 2 consecutive
tracks from the same album?
> implementing a playlist in a more natural way using Emacs' tabulated-list
I'd opt for removing emms-browser-playlist-xxx-format and adding emms-playlist-format instead. Each field in this format string could be mapped to a column of a tabulated-list or, alternatively, formatted with the facilities now available to the browser (that would have to be moved to emms.el as general utilities, in that case, and probably improved to support some kind of alignment). Playlists would be strictly flat, non hierarchical. Cells with the same value than the one above could be (optionally) left empty to emulate a more tree-like view and remove annoying duplications. Regarding images, I don't see any way to make them fit nicely in this 2d structure: if you avoid repetitions some rows will be higher than others, and repeating is even worse. If tabulated-list allowed row-spanning (which I doubt), that could be a reasonable solution for lists including many successive tracks from the same album. But, sincerely, I don't see any value in putting images in a playlist, even Spotify with all its bells and whistles doesn't do that. That's what the browser is for. emms-track-description-function could be kept for backwards compatibility: if non nil it will return the one and only cell for each row in a one column (track) table.
Maybe we could just drop cover display from the playlist and have a separate
image buffer
I prefer something like M-. to open a temporary window with all meta info available, including the image. Complex window layouts are often innefective and doesn't look very well (I'm specially thinking about mpc.el here).
Best regards
--
Carlos