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

[Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com>]

Hi,

My comments below.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 12:00 PM, lads <luis a de sousa gmail com> wrote:
> 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.

The best way to help us improve Banshee would be to report those
issues in our bugtracker, one bug per issue :
banshee.fm/contribute/file-bugs/
I'll add a few questions below, in case you'd like to investigate those issues.

> *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.

Strange, I've never heard about this. It might be related to GStreamer
or the way we use it. It'd be interesting to know if it happens with
other GStreamer-based player, totem or rhythmbox.

> *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).

If a track fails to play, we mark it as failed and try to move on to
the next track, without interrupting the user. Detecting files that
are not available and hiding them would be nice indeed.

> *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.

I don't understand how the duplicates appear exactly: do you rescan
your music library ? Or are those hard drives detected as external
devices, like mp3 players ?
In order to remove duplicates, you could create a smart playlist with
the following criteria : "File location" contains "/media/myDrive_".
Then select all tracks and go to Edit > Remove from Library.

> *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.

Running "banshee --debug" and grabbing the output when the problem
happens would be helpful.

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

Thanks for your feedback !

-- 
Bertrand Lorentz