Welcome to the 2nd issue of the Rhythmbox Breakdown, the kind-of-weekly posting to let everyone know the juicy gossip from the world of Rhythmbox. For those who read the rhythmbox-devel mailing list it will give a summary of activity, and provide information about things that haven't (yet) been discussed on the list. For those who don't read rhythmbox-devel, it will let you know all the cool stuff that we've been up to. Approaching 0.9.2 ----------------- According to the currently-planned release schedule, we're aiming to get 0.9.2 out sometime around next weekend, or shortly after that. Thing means that we need to begin a string freeze fairly soon, so that the translators can update their translations. Because of this, anyone who has patches that they want to get in to 0.9.2, which change strings or UI, will need to let us know very soon. Discussions on Rhythmbox-devel ------------------------------ Last weeks issue started off a lot of discussion about Rhythmbox's user interface. The toolbar patch got a lot of focus, as it was one of last week's bugs-of-the-week. UI: Most people seemed fairly receptive to the idea of using a toolbar, although some people were concerned it would lead to the controls taking up more space. The separation of the play/pause/stop buttons was though to be a bad idea, which lead to an updated patch where there was a single Play toggle button. Another UI suggestion was that the "General" tab of the preferences window could be removed. Currently it contains the check-boxes to control whether certain columns are visible. The original suggestion which some people liked was to have a "Visible Columns" item in the view menu, which would bring up a window containing the check-boxes. Alternative suggestions were adding a "Visible Columns" sub-menu to the view menu, or context menu. The removal of the column headers was also suggested, with sorting controlled from a combo-box - which would leave more space for the track listing. Several people didn't agree with this, because it would make it less obvious what the columns were, especially in the case of the browsers. It would also prevent anyone from resizing columns, and change the "sort by clicking on column header" that works in most GTK applications. Once again the search box was brought up. As well as the usual discussion about a clear button, there were suggestions of removing it completely. While keeping the search box contents across session is bad because it confuses a lot of users, it was felt that emptying it when you look at a different source wasn't a good idea because it will change what is being played. Also discussed was the idea of making the browsers and the search box mutually exclusive, as both working at once sometimes confuses users Play Queue: Jonathan Matthew send his much-anticipated updated version of the "play queue" patch to the list for discussion. Although it still has some quirks and minor bugs that need to ironed out, it works very well. This will probably be one of the big features of 0.9.3. Play orders: Paul Boyd sent a patch to the list implement a "repeat one song" play order, which prompted a short discussion on how to put this in the user interface. The current version adds a "Play Order" sub-menu to the control menu, which lets you access the new play order and all 7 existing ones (only 4 of which you could get to before). Hopefully this will lead to people writing some new play orders, such as album-shuffle or ones based on suggestions from AudioScrobbler. Summary of Changes in CVS ------------------------- One change that didn't get mentioned last week was a few small improvement in tag-editing. The first is that Rhythmbox now checks the new file to ensure that it is still readable by GStreamer, which should prevent corruption of files. ID3 tag editing should work as well, and has been tested by a few people without problems. Support has also been added for using the year/date metadata from tracks. Rhythmbox uses the full date internally, but only the year is currently visible in the interface. The New Radio Station command now uses the Station Information window, and doesn't require you to enter a name or genre - which will be automatically fetched. Bugs of the Week ---------------- Bugs 140355 (authenticated gnome-vfs) and 312122 (column auto-sizing) got mentioned last week, but no-one made any comments about them. Bug 315389, add "Move to Trash" command: (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315389) You can remove tracks you don't like from your library, but unless you manually delete (or move) the files, they will be re-added if you import the folder again to add new music. Deleting them yourself can be difficult, because you have to find the file to delete it. The patch on this bug adds a "Move to Trash" command to the edit menu and the context menu on tracks, which aim to make deleting tracks you don't like much easier. The patch works well, although currently has issues if you don't have permission to remove the file, or put it in the trash. That's it for this week, so go download cvs head, break it and file bugs. Also remember to try out the patches and see if you like them, and they work for you -- James "Doc" Livingston
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