talking with my friends has gotten me deeper into torrenting and now i have normal thoughts daily about running my thinkpad with qbittorrent to seed torrents while im at work to earn ratio. also i got more music out of it, thats important too. i have thoughts about when i should buy music vs torrenting, but generally im doing it for the accessibility of not needing to sign up to 50 individual distribution storefronts, so my rule of thumb is kind of just that if its on bandcamp and theyre not signed to universal i will buy it

rather than exposing things like loved/favourite tracks directly, you can create playlists based on certain tags or features of tracks, including loved status. when doing this make sure you enable Auto reload playlists (MENU > Settings > Function > Tab 1 > Auto reload playlists)

also while you're here, if youre like me and have a billion playlists you can stop them clogging the top bar by unchecking Tabs in top panel

layouts

tauon has a weird layouts system

• the first 3 layouts are similar in that they have the main track list, and a corner button to pop out playlists, with the differences between them (in descending order) being that they show the track info, album gallery or nothing in the right panel (in most of the screenshots of tauon ive been showing ive been using the album gallery)

• the 4th layout is a "showcase" layout that show lyrics if you have those enabled
• the 5th is an internet radio layout, i havent tried this much
• the 6th is not a layout actually, but toggles the columns and column headers of the first 3 layouts, i dont know why this isnt just a setting to be honest

themes and theme images

tauon has themes you can change under MENU > Theme, but you can also add and create your own by opening the data folder (MENU > Function > Open data folder) and creating them under the themes folder. ive barely explored the theme format but i got pretty far copying over and editing their internal themes , changing some colours here and there

to get my own little image in the track list, i based my theme off the "Charmed" theme, which uses a trimmed base64 encoded image string inside a .tdeco file to store the image. the folder and file seem to need to be contained in their own folder for this to work. in order to generate the image string i used a base64 image encoder  online, and trimmed the "data:image/png;base64," portion of the string off, i assume this will only work with pngs given this

for anyone following at home, you can try this by copying the source "Charmed" theme into your theme folder, and replacing the value of the "image-data" key with your image string between the double quotes. if you're using the encoder i linked, you'll want to click "Show code"