Re: G2.10 Module Proposal: Sound Juicer

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi,

> About these audio profiles: Even if sound-juicer uses the gstreamer (?)
> audio profiles, surely sound-juicer is still the most sensible place for
> the user to choose between encoding to ogg or mp3?

I don't think so.  As in the rest of GNOME, focus was on "have sensible
defaults".  Most people have no need to switch between ogg and mp3.
They want to rip their audio into a format that works for them.

GNOME promotes free formats.  Hence, for each of the profiles, free
formats are currently chosen as default.  These profiles are task-
oriented and satisfy what users basically do, without referencing actual
implementation.

If someone has a need for both ogg and mp3, he has this need because,
for example, he prefers free formats as well, but happens to have a
player that can only do mp3.  To allow the user to do this, he would
create an additional audio profile which would read "for my crap
portable player" which would probably also have different quality
settings.

This is how I envisioned the profiles to work, in accordance with other
design ideas for the GNOME desktop in general.

When I have some more time I will write more of this down and add some
of the small goodies I had planned for various bits and pieces, like,
say, "convert set of audio files to a profile from in nautilus".

> I hope that the main purpose of the audio profiles is that there is at
> least one working audio profile that applications can use instead of
> guessing at sensible defaults. And I hope that we don't expect most people
> to change the audio profiles, or add new profiles.

Exactly.  There are three sensible default profiles, which cover all
common use cases.

> Also, I can imagine that there might be two audio profiles for something
> like "normal" and "quiet", with everything but the volume being the same.

I'm not following what you mean her by "normal" and "quiet" ?

> But I'd be annoyed if I had to change other stuff (such as switching mp3
> to ogg) twice (in each profile).

Think about the use cases for switching the codec, or why you would even
care in the first place in a perfect desktop.  What are they ? Give me
something to work with.

>  This would leave room for a lot of
> strange effects. I'd wonder why sound-juicer generates oggs when my
> computer is quiet, but mp3s when its loud.

I guess I'm not following this part.  There's currently no "loud" or
"quiet" audio profile and I'm not sure what you would have it do.

Thomas


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