[Muine] Feature Request

[Rene Valois <rene localgod net>]

Hello all,

I haven't posted in quite awhile, but I've been following Muine and it's
becoming truly great software. I'm just a regular user of muine with
some comments, hopefully they will be of use to you. 

Please excuse me if I'm going over covered ground here. I've read the
TODO and searched the mailing list to the best of my ability.

I don't always know what I want to play. Most of the time I like to just
open up my music library and queue anything that grabs my attention.
Muine doesn't accomodate this type of browsing very well.

Clicking on "Add Songs" results in a dialog that doesn't show all the
songs in my music library. The only way of narrowing things down is the
search field. The search field works well if I know I want to listen to
something by Led Zepplin, but when I don't know what I want to listen
to, it doesn't help. As a user, I'm *expected* to use the search
function to narrow things down, and not all my songs are shown in the
dialog otherwise. This makes it inadequate for browsing.

This is one area, IMO, where Rhythmbox does things very well. I can
browse by artist, album, *OR* songs without having to put in search
terms.

Secondly, I'm not sure where Jorn comes down on the idea of ratings. I
searched the mailing list for "rate" and "ratings" and came up with
nothing. 

I think song ratings would be very useful and probably will integrate
well with the planned grouping features. Again, ratings accomodate the
sort of lazy music listener I am. I may have my playlist populated with
a bunch of new stuff, and hear something out of my new music that I
really enjoy, so I give it 4 stars. Otherwise, I have to remember the
name of the track and who it's performed by if I don't want it to be
lost in my gigantic music library until the next time I stumble upon it.

A group along the lines of "Four Star songs added within the last week"
would be a good way of keeping track of songs I like, but may otherwise
forget. Ratings could come in handy for favorites groups (five stars),
and even for hiding bad songs that sneak into the library with otherwise
good albums (one star), ensuring it never finds it's way onto the
playlist.

There also seems to be a good place for five stars just underneath the
artist name and the time remaining on the main window. Muine could be
the first open source player to really nail the rating implementation. 

Anyways, that's it from me.

Thanks for listening :)

-rv