Re: [Deskbar] Muine song/album search

[Raphael Slinckx <raphael slinckx net>]

Hi !

On Sun, 2005-11-13 at 21:17 -0800, Eric Lesh wrote:
> This adds a handler that allows for playing an music in Muine by
> searching for an album or song name (two separate handlers).  It works
> fine, but has a number of caveats:
> 

The feature is excellent, i wanted to have something like that, but
couldn't find the time!

First of all, let me make a comment: wouldn't it be better to have a
static match being returned hat just allow to play the typed text ?

For example, i type 'Led Zeppelin', scroll down to Play songs from 'Led
Zeppelin', and muine (or any other player) would just make a playlist
with these search terms. The more you add, the more specific the
resulting playlist will be.

That avoids cluttering the search list with lots of song titles or
albums, and also solves to album/song distinction problem, and IMHO is
easier to use in a hurry.

The downside is that it probably needs some love from muine/player side
to support such a feature, either through a remote interface, or through
shell commands.

I recently spoke to RB guys, they preferred this version instead of the
'song-completion' one, and were ready to implement the remote
'set_search_term-and-play-matching-results'-like dbus method.

> * Requires muine-shell (I'm using python2.3, so can't compile dbus
> bindings yet)

I guess this can be checked in the requirements method for the handler,
first check for muine dbus interface, then muine-shell executable, and
finally refuse to load.

> * If you are running both the album and song handlers, you can't
> distinguish between songs and albums of the same name. Both display
> 'Play %(song/album) by %(artist)'.  Maybe  albums should say 'Play album
> %(album) by %(artist)' or something?

If we go for the first option, this becomes a non-issue. Otherwise the
second one is better Play album x from y, or play song x from y.

> * I don't normally use Python, so things are probably ugly.
> Specifically, the database parsing algorithm could use work, because it
> is using a nasty regex that embarrasses me a little bit.

The regex is embarassing :) That's why using a more generic search
interface may allow us not to do the indexing part, cause that part
takes memory, cpu clocks and time, and people generally do not like that
(cf. pseudo flame fest against python while proposing deskbar :))

> 
> All these things could obviously be fixed by someone who has some
> knowledge of Python and a desire to use this.  Hopefully somebody finds
> this useful.  At the very least, it may inspire someone to hack up the
> same thing for Rhythmbox, Banshee, or Quodlibet.
> 

Thanks for posting this, it will allow people to see how a handler can
be done, and maybe trigger other ideas ?

I will not merge the handler as-is in CVS yet, we must first settle for
the policy of such handlers, to provide an unified interface for every
player out there. Maybe a single-do-it-all handler, or separate handlers
with various checks to see which player is present. I think one handler
would be better in this case, cause it's not rare to see more than one
player installed, and makes detection harder (there is no 'music player'
preferences in gnome)

In any case you may want to consider posting it as another handler
tutorial in the http://live.gnome.org/DeskbarApplet page (search
'Extending' for the exact url).

I'll periodically copy these to the real deskbar website as developper
doc and tutorial.