Helium comes with with several tools which helps you to make the playing experience smart and easy to use.
Before starting to describe possible ways for playing items, you should be aware of two things:
Manually queued items and automatically queued items.
Manually queued items
If you for example hover over an album and click the play symbol it will mean that you are manually queueing all tracks from the album to the Play queue.
The same happens if you queue an album or selection of tracks next or last to the Play queue.
You can easily see which items that are manually queued in the Play queue by changing to the Play queue view and look at the first column. If it contains a filled dot it means that the track is manually queued.
Automatically queued items
Automatically queue items means the opposite to manually queued items, items that have been automatically queued.
They can have been queued via the Auto-enqueue function or if you for example double-click a track in the middle of a track list. In this case the track you are double-clicking will be marked as manually queued and the rest of the tracks below the clicked track will be marked as automatically queued.
To maintain order in the Play queue, items that are manually queued will be prioritized over automaticaly queued items.
For example if you have 10 tracks in the Play queue where the first two are manually queued and the rest are automatically queued and you then select three files to queue last, the three files will be placed after the last manually queued item.
This is a very useful function for parties and similar situations, where different people tend to request multiple tracks at once or even change tracks often, since this mode will allow you to retain any tracks that are manually queued so each requested track will appear sooner or later.
When the auto enqueue mode is active, the same logic as above applies. If a limitor is used to control the total number of items in the Play queue, automatically queued items are those that will be trimmed to ensure that no manual queued tracks are lost.