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

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 13:32 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 07:23, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> 
> > Yes, Rhythmbox works well for the picker people. And Muine works at
> > least as well there: The "Play album"/"Play song" buttons .. 
> 
> Oh, I agree it supports it, I'm just not sure it's as straightforward.

Have you given it a shot?

I personally think it is quite hard to make playing an album more
straightforward than pressing the big "Play album" button :)

Here we hit another Rhythmbox usability problem btw- to many first-time
users (of the "newbie" kind) it is not obvious you have to doubleclick a
song to get started. Of course, to play a song when nothing is playing
you can press "Play", but after that it gets "complicated".

> > 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 .. 
> 
> That's true, it is a problem.
> 
> On the other hand, I'm not sure Muine's groups and playlist filling is
> going to be very intuitive at first either for people who want to
> shuffle music (which seems to be a surprisingly high percentage of what
> Rhythmbox users do, something I hadn't realized until recently).

That indeed still has to be seen. As it is not implemented yet I haven't
had any user feedback yet. I agree the proposal looks a bit daunting,
but I have high hopes it will work well in practice. But of course, it
might also end up as a total disaster..

But for one thing I think the playlist filling is a whole lot more
useful than pressing "Shuffle" on everything. With playlist filling I
can say things like, OK, tonight I want to listen to whatever Jazz and
classical music I happen to have. (We'd have Jazz and Classical groups
autogenerated from all songs with their genre tag set to
Jazz/Classical). I have such a variety of styles in my collection that
having totally random stuff play is extremely annoying: I mean, I
certainly don't want to hear Opeth when I'm almost falling asleep on
Enya. Of course I could make a playlist with Rhythmbox, and than start
to shuffle play that, but that can almost be called a project-
definitely too much trouble to my tastes. And if I were to make these
once, and save them, I would have to have three playlists: "Jazz",
"Classical", and "Jazz and Classical". Imagine having to do this for all
possible combinations I want to use, ever. Handy!

> > 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".
> 
> And Play CD?  It would also be confusing what things like next/previous
> apply to if playback is stopped.  Which application do you hide on
> left-click?  And who handles multimedia keys if you have both open?

A CD player would be very simple, just a track list, and prev/play/next
buttons. We don't need more. Above that I think it is unlikely many
people will use a CD player and a collection player at the same time,
people tend to either play CDs or rip their CDs to their collection. (Of
course there are exceptions..)

I agree the tray icon issue is not trivial. But I am convinced we can
come up with something nice there. I've been thinking a bit about it,
here's a random ideas I got (not saying it's good, but it's probably a
decent start):

As the notification area is really the *notification* area, we should
probably put letting the user know whether anything is playing, and what
it is as prime priority. This means the icon would be associated with
the currently playing "thing". So it would have the menu associated
with, if iradio is playing, iradio, and if the collection is playing,
the collection. As soon as the user starts playing a song in the
collection, iradio will stop playing, and the icon would have the menu
of the collection player.

> > 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?
> 
> I think most people play music, while very few edit images :)

I think they are approximately equally big groups of people. 

There's this handful of "reference users" I use sometimes:

- My dad edits images, but doesnt play music
- My mum does neither
- One of my sisters does both
- The other only edits images
- My gf does both
- My gf's mum does neither

> > 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.
> 
> I think Rhythmbox is not an iTunes clone to the same extent that
> Evolution 1.5 isn't an Outlook clone, personally.  They're each
> obviously inspired by their counterpart, but have improved and
> differentiated.

You're right. Evolution 1.5 was a bad example though (also as I still
think the interface is rather overwhelming and confusing at times (What
I'd really like to see is a Mail.app like thing for GNOME), but that's
another story .. )


Jorn