The only variation on this might be to keep the one or two most recently played songs, grayed out, before they drop off the queue, to answer the question: What was that song I heard before?
I don't think that rhythmbox should unnecessarly (and blindly) copy iTunes, but it seems likely that non-trivial amounts of use testing went into its design.
So, FWIW, iTunes' Party Shuffle keeps 5 recently played songs (greyed out) so that a user can answer this question. I think this is a good number. With 1-2, it's not so easy to answer the question during a party of "Was ______ played before?". And, on >1024x768 screens, 5 is a small fraction of the "upcoming" list.
Interestingly, the Party Shuffle mode provides visible pop-up menus so that a user can easily change the number of past songs & future songs. I can't decide if this was because their UI engineers punted, or if it is because they thought that users would often change the ratios as they used the queuing system:
Small screen shot here: http://www.apple.com/itunes/playlists.html
I dislike the screen space wasted by the iTunes' pop-ups. I also think that the "future" number choice is unnecessary (unless an auto-add from the Library is added to rhythmbox's queue).
Perhaps a better UI is to make the divider between previously-played and to-be-played "grabbable" and the user can move it up and down the screen to his/her personal preference for how many songs shown in the past. This also neatly solves the debate about how many to show as a hard coded number by making it changeable in the GUI. ;-)
thomas
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