[Banshee-List] Is Banshee my refuge from Amarok 2?

[michaelzap <me zoomzap com>]

Hello all -

I'm a big fan of Amarok 1.4, so I've only dabbled in other media players.
But Amarok 2 is a gawdawfowl mess, and 1.4 will no longer be supported as of
Jaunty. I've always kind of wanted a non-KDE music player anyway, so I've
been trying out Banshee as an alternative.

So far I'm interested but not convinced...

My biggest issue is that I much prefer the way that Amarok 1.4 organizes and
displays my library (a nested list to the left that can be sorted by
multiple criteria, although I always use Artist/Album) to the way that
Banshee does it (which takes up the whole screen and I find a lot harder to
follow visually). And I also like the way that Amarok 1.4 groups Various
Artist discs separately in that list. What would it take to get Banshee to
organize libraries in this way, and is there any realistic possibility that
it will happen (perhaps as a plug-in)?

I also like being able to view lyrics or artist info right in the content
pane, although I suppose that's not essential.

In Amarok, I routinely grab disc after disc of music, throw it into my
playlist, and then shuffle it before I play it. That way I can reorder the
tracks a bit if I like, and I can see what's coming up next. As far as I can
tell, Banshee doesn't shuffle tracks like that (in fact when I turn on
shuffle by song it doesn't seem to do anything at all...). Maybe this should
be called "Randomize playlist" rather than shuffle so as to make clear the
distinction. I want to be able to randomize my playlist.

I also want to be able to resize any and all panes (I can't really use the
Recommended Artist, etc. pane at that size, for example).

I'd kind of like a stop button, although I guess pause does the trick. I
could live without a stop button, but I'm used to using it and not pause.
The behavior is slightly different...

Do tracks have to disappear from my Play Queue after they've been played?
Sometimes I want to go back a bit (perhaps I was out of the room and didn't
hear it all), and just now I jumped forward several tracks to see what would
happen and after that track finished ALL of the tracks before it disappeared
from my play queue. So now I'd have to recreate this list if I wanted to
hear those tracks. This seems unnecessary and frustrating to me. I'd at
least like the option to just advance the queue but not remove played tracks
from it.

Is there any playlist management in Banshee? So far all I see is the ability
to export them. I'd like to be able to save and browse playlists in the left
pane.

There are things that I really like about Banshee, and I'm certainly not
looking to turn it into Amarok 1.5. But I also do believe that the user
interface of Amarok 1.4 is really, really good and I'd love to see the best
elements of it adopted by another project. Please take these suggestions as
constructive criticism, and if there are ways to do some of what I want in
Banshee now please let me know.

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