Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] More Suggestions

[Moe Wibble <t1lt bk ru>]

On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 10:53:26AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 08:01, Moe Wibble wrote:
> 
> > Here's some misbehaviour that I have spotted, tho:
> > 
> > 1. The browser starts in default mode (ALL/ALL/ALL)
> > 2. Select an Artist -> Selection narrows down to artist
> > 3. Select an Album  -> Selection narrows to artist/album
> > 4. Select "ALL" in the Artist-pane -> Album jumps back to "ALL", too
> > 
> > Imho #4 is wrong.
> > I often search by artist and then want to see the whole album (VA).
> > Is it a bug or is it me? :)
> 
> It's a known issue, see:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127849

Ah, I see. Well, thanks for introducing me. ;)

> > - Directory Tree View
> >   In addition to the existing browser-panes I'd love to have a tree view
> >   that allows me to browse my collection by directory.
> >   I have tons of poorly tagged/named mp3s laying around, so the search
> >   by artist/album doesn't always do the right thing for me.
> 
> Rhythmbox is trying to get away from thinking of your music as separate
> files.  So this wouldn't really fit in with that view.  Instead what
> we'd like to do is have a tool for fixing your metadata, and perhaps
> automatically reorganizing your library on disk too.

I do like the idea. But I think it can never work out in the Real World
(unfornationally). There's just always this one friend who comes over with
his silver disc full of nice audio-files none of which matches any of
the pre-made tagging/metadata-scheme that I may have.
Also I often want to listen to stuff that's stored somewhere on disk
"temporarily". I don't want to import that kind of files to the library but
I'd still like to use the general playlist features on them.

> > - Jump to playing song (CTRL-J)
> >   Seems like this always resets the browser to ALL/ALL/ALL.
> 
> It only resets the browser if the song isn't visible currently.

I find this behaviour confusing. But I think the real problem (CTRL-J
should be a shortcut for convinience, not a basic navigation tool) can be
easily solved by just displaying all relevant info about the playing song
in some fixed location all the time. Then the only time you need to go back
would be when you actually lose track.

> >   Would be nice to have it go back to the playlist/pane-pos where it was
> >   when I last time manually started a song.
> 
> Hmm.  That might be possible, although there are some corner cases,
> particularly once we have metadata editing.

Sync on CTRL-J?

> > - Song-/Artist-name click-action
> >   The websearch is pretty useless to me. Would be nice if it was configurable
> >   to do whatever I want (e.g. open song properties/jump to song as in
> >   CTRL-J, launch a script)
> 
> I guess the search is kind of useless if you're not connected to the
> Internet at least.  How exactly it would be configurable needs more
> thought.

A very simple scripting hook via system() that gets passed all
relevant song/playlist info. That way the user can basically do everything.
If there is no hook configured by the user then the song-name should just
not be clickable.
If you want to make it really fancy then pass some less obvious
details on to the hook-script, too. Like on which char of the artist-name/
album-name was clicked and which mousebutton was used. Maybe you could even
tell the script about the current playing position within the song
and the volume level, probably the main window position.
Throw in a context-menu for multiple actions and it's complete.

http://scripts.rhythmbox.org?
I'd donate a 'to_iso' and 'to_ftp'-script. :)

> > - Advanced Playlist feats.
> >   * Playlist in playlist (drag playlist onto another to "chain" them up)
> >   * Actions over the files in a playlist, like:
> >     "copy all files to directory"
> 
> You can already do this by selecting all the songs and dragging and
> dropping to a nautilus window.
> >     "execute script for each file"
> 
> If nautilus had icons for each script, you could likewise do this by
> dragging the songs to a nautilus script.

Ahhh, didn't know that.
Okay, nevermind I guess. :)


cheers,
moe