The default "left-click to
fast-forward" thus feels a little unintuitive as a result. I actually
didn't know about the middle-click trick; is there a tooltip to
communicate that?
No, but it's not a Banshee thing; that's a GTK+ default for a progress bar control/widget.
A symptom of trying to cram too much functionality (seeking, and
fast-forward/rewind) in one control. When I realized that Banshee's
track bar behaved as a progress bar, I thought: "A seek bar that
doesn't behave like any seek bar I've ever seen. That's weird." It
does feel a little strange, no doubt.
Totally agreed, but I don't think anyone on the Banshee team should spend any time making this behave differently than GTK+'s progress bar, just for the sake of consistency. (To be fair, they've done good work with their custom TreeView, so....)
That said, I completely agree, and would wholeheartedly support some GTK+ upstream work to make this control/widget behave more usefully and intuitively.