Re: [Muine] Re: Introducing Muine, Rhythmbox in 2.8 and other things

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 03:25 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 07:25, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> 
> > The reason I started to design Muine is simple. The iTunes model works
> > relatively well, but it has issues, the most prominent one being
> > queueing music not working transparantly and smoothly. 
> 
> I think there are at least two kinds of people; the "album picker" kind
> and the "DJ" kind.  The album picker people (like me) generally just
> pick a song, artist or album to play, and when it's done, pick another. 
> Or just leave the player on shuffle.  Rhythmbox works pretty well for
> them, I think.  The DJ people really want to queue up songs or albums,
> and as you say, Rhythmbox doesn't work very well for them.  I would note
> that it still can work - you can create a playlist and drag and drop
> things in there.  But for the DJ people, Muine is probably far more
> intuitive.

Yes, Rhythmbox works well for the picker people. And Muine works at
least as well there: The "Play album"/"Play song" buttons .. and it
works well for DJ people too. "Shuffle all"-like playback is coming:
http://huizen.dds.nl/~jbaayen/proposal.html. Therefore I think Muine has
a higher potential to please everyone ..

Rhythmbox/iTunes playlist creation is unfortunately extremely
counter-intuitive. Many people have no clue they should drag songs to
the "list row on the left" to put them into that playlist .. 

> > - Internet radio
> 
> I've been thinking about this recently.  Some people have suggested
> internet radio should be broken out of Rhythmbox in the past too.  But I
> think to do so would be to mostly miss the point of Rhythmbox.  The idea
> is to be "the" music playback program.  When you want to play music
> (whether that's local, CD-ROM, or internet radio), you launch "Music
> Player" (Of course Rhythmbox currently fails in that it doesn't play
> CDs, but it shouldn't be too hard to add).
> 
> Having separate applications for all these things is clean in one sense,
> but it's also weird in another.  Like right now, both Rhythmbox and the
> GNOME CD player have tray icons.  If we broke internet radio out into a
> separate application, would you then have three tray icons?  If we only
> had one, which application would it apply to?
> 
> You also have large chunks of redundant UI among all three.  

Not really. Looking at Link's iradio mockup and muine, the only thing in
common are the playback buttons. And like I said in my other mail, the
tray icon could be shared. The tray icon's 'pause' command would apply
to whatever is playing, and it would include commands like "Play
album"/"Play song"/"Play station".

But from the Rhythmbox point of view I agree. Rhythmbox is designed to
do everything, so why not let it do everything .. (Note that I'm not
saying it does everything well ;) )

> > - Visualization
> >   This belongs in a separate application, or xscreensaver module or
> > whatever. 
> 
> For Rhythmbox, I think it makes sense to do visualization.

Not sure. It's going to add yet another mode (if you do it in the iTunes
way, that is)

> 
> > This app could read data from a sound server.
> 
> Well, we need a good one of those first :)

Yea. 

> 
> > There has been talk about proposing Rhythmbox for GNOME 2.8.  I'm not
> > sure it is a good idea to include *any* music player in the desktop
> > release.  Something that plays music files, like totem, is a must in my
> > opinion, but a full-blown music player is not something everybody will
> > use.  I mean, having a full blown music playback application in an
> > office workstation seems a little out of place.  
> 
> I think music playback should be regarded as a pretty crucial feature of
> the desktop nowadays.  GNOME isn't just targeting office workstations,
> keep in mind.  And even there, I think music playback is pretty
> common...

I agree it is a fundamental piece of software for a lot of people. But
the GIMP is too for many. Does that mean we include the GIMP in the core
desktop?

> > Other than that Rhythmbox has its usage problems which are
> > extremely hard if not impossible to fix properly
> 
> For some people, yes.
> 
> >  (I've been trying for
> > more than a year), and I'm not sure shipping an iTunes clone (not
> > entirely of course, but basically) in the core desktop is too good for
> > GNOME's image.
> 
> Well, we didn't exactly invent things like web browsers, file managers,
> calculators, text editors, or email programs either :)

No, but epiphany is innovative (the bookmarks system!), qalculate is an
innovative piece of software, evolution 1.5 is no longer just an outlook
clone, etc.


Jorn