Re: [Banshee-List] [clementine-player] Banshee versus Clementine versus any other audio software

[Arnaud BIENNER <arnaud bienner gmail com>]

Hi,

Thanks for your email, it's always appreciated to have users feedback.

Let me (quickly) answer you, about Clementine.

About stability, we do our best but we also want new features to be available.

But IMO most critical bugs are always fixed quickly.

Also, keep in mind that we are all developers working on this project on our spare time.
Moreover, we are not a big team (currently 3 active developers (6 in the palmy days) + people sending us patches occasionally).

But, as it's an open source project, I encourage you to have a look to the code and try to provide solution for the problems you're talking about.
The code isn't so hard to understand I believe, and we are accessible (on IRC, on mailing list, ...) if you have questions or want to submit a patch.

Just one thing about the remote control: it is a unstable feature, and it is not available by default.
I know that some distributions enable it, but I believe it's a quite bad idea as we marked it explicitly unstable, and that (as you figured out) it doesn't work so well atm.

If you want to have deeper discussion about particular issues, I invite to visit our bugtracker (http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/issues/list) as it is a better place to discuss this kind of thing.

Arnaud

2012/3/16 Martin G <ebisumartin gmail com>

Banshee delelopers, Clementine developers, developers of audio
software for Ubuntu in general,

I'm just putting this out there, and cross posting to both lists. This
is just an open letter, a description of how these applications feel
to a user, just in hopes that maybe someone will find some perspective
in it, and maybe, just maybe, baseline stability can be seen as higher
importance than feature development.

It seems to me that I always see on list requests for new features and
development of new features, but the fact is that the base programs
don't work reliably well. Banshee is up past version 2, Clementine is
past version one, and yet neither are rock solid in their basic
features.

I'm not expecting any major solutions, but where else can I express
what is basically just sadness that after 7 or 8 years, Ubuntu still
doesn't have a music application that is as reliable as maybe as many
as a dozen, or more, options for other operating systems.

It seems as though these projects are hampered by what is a common
issue in open source, which is that it is fun and exciting to work on
new algorithms to make new types of clever playlists, or to develop
support for a new music file format or playlist, but it's boring as
watching paint dry to debug and spend time hunting down some bug in
basic functionality. So features increase while stability improves by
only minor increments.

Maybe this is just a fact of life with open source. Don't get me
wrong, I believe in open source and think some great things have been
done. The fact remains though, that there's a certain haphaazard
quality to the progress. Some types of programs come together really
well and make amazing advances, some flounder without any sensible
development, and most are in the middle, making some progress but can
be frustrating in that certain faults seem to never get addressed.
Audio and music software on Ubuntu seems to fall into the lower end of
this middle ground. I can play a lot of music enough that I can get by
and enjoy my music collection, but there are demerits which never go
away so that I couldn't say I'm content.

Anyway, that's just my .02$. I hope some day there will be some kind
of audio software on Ubuntu that will do everything that Banshee and
Clementine claim to do, but also do those things without caveats and
errors.

- - -

Just for reference, below is a list of the pros and cons that prevent
me from committing to either Banshee or Clementine. All of them relate
to features that exist, but they just aren't reliable, or one exists
in one application but not the other. In other words, I'm not hoping
for some esoteric feature, I just would like what's available to work,
and work in one place

I like Banshee because:
It reasonably reliable (though not 100%) for transferring music and
playlists to my Android (which is my main portable MP3)
The interface for sorting playlists and rating songs is workable.
There is a decent remote app for my Android phone so I can control it
over the LAN.

I don't like Banshee because:
It does not reliably load streaming internet audio. (Some links do not
work, some take several tries to load)
No crossfading
It does not come with sets of pre-bookmarked internet radio streams

I like Clementine because:
Cross fading
Pre installed radio stream bookmarks
Radio streams always connect (though not perfectly, see below)

I don't like Clementine because:
Interface is buggy (sometimes I click on one playlist, and all are
selected, doesn't always keep last playlist when closing and opening
again, songs don't always appear in playlist, etc...)
While there is a remote app, it really doesn't work very well at all
When connecting to a radio stream for the first time, it stops and
starts about 5 times before finally playing through (buffering
problem?)
lack of plug ins or extensibility (alarm, sleep, and other functions)

--
Dave M G