[Banshee-List] Quitting Banshee: the reasons why.

[lads <luis a de sousa gmail com>]

Dear Banshee fellowship,

I've upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 two months ago and have been using Banshee
since. I'm giving it up and going back to Rhythmbox. Here I lay the problems
that lead me to do so, may it help improve Banshee in the future.

*First 5 seconds of the track are not audible*

This happened the first time I used Banshee and it repeated many times
during the first week of use. When you click play on some file the time
starts increasing but the sound only comes at about 5 seconds into the
track, missing these first moments of music. With time it became less and
less frequent; I have no idea what may be causing this.

*Tracks on disconnected hard drives*

I have music files spread across several hard drives and operating systems,
that I use at work and at home. When inadvertently a file from a
disconnected hard drive is brought on play Banshee doesn't play any music
but it doesn't emit an error message either, it's up to you to figure out
what's wrong. Rhymthbox simply hides files in its playlist that are not
available at the moment; when a remote hard drive is re-connected it
automatically re-lists any files that may be stored there. Also, if
Rhymthbox can't read a file for some reason it emits an error message
(usually not very helpful but at least you know something's wrong).

*Duplicate file names*

After about one month of usage Banshee started listing some files in
duplicate. It took me quite a while to understand what is causing this:
sometimes Ubuntu fails to unmout remote hard drives leaving unused
directories at /media. When this happens Ubuntu remounts the drive the next
time with a “_” sufix to its name, e.g. “myDrive_”. The result: Banshee
double lists files at “myDrive” and “myDrive_”. At this time some tracks are
now listed in triplicate and the playlist has now dozens of thousands of
files. This is the main reason why I'm quitting Banshee, since there's easy
way to simply clean these duplicates. This was never a problem with
Rhythmbox, perhaps because it never lists files in drives it can't access.

*Play stops unexpectedly*

This has become quite frequent, and may be a consequence of the duplicate
and triplicate listing, though it happens with radios too. Banshee simply
stops playing at the end of some random track without any error message;
imagine there is a 10 track LP, you start playing the first track and it
goes down to the 7th or 8th and then simply stops. Though with files you can
restart the playing, with radios this usually requires a restart to Banshee.

Visually Banshee is surely an improvement over Rhythmbox, but it still has a
few degrees to climb before reaching the same level of maturity.

Best.


--
View this message in context: http://banshee-media-player.2283330.n4.nabble.com/Quitting-Banshee-the-reasons-why-tp3692236p3692236.html
Sent from the Banshee Media Player mailing list archive at Nabble.com.