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

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 19:28 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 14:19, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> > 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've tried; my attempts at installing Muine have been a long saga - the
> first time I tried, rpm.livna.org was down so I couldn't get libid3tag,
> and Muine has no option to disable MP3.  More recently that came back
> up, and I tried again, but got lost in a sea of Mono dependencies.  I
> finally today made a push to get that all figured out today and running,
> and after I got Muine to configure, during the build I get:
> 
> Making all in src
> make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/muine-0.6.0/src'
> wsdl ./AmazonSearchService.wsdl
> Mono Web Services Description Language Utility
> Writing file 'AmazonSearchService.cs'
> make[2]: *** [AmazonSearchService.cs] Segmentation fault
> 
> I'm kind of stuck there (it doesn't seem like a Muine bug).

This is an annoying mono buggie, see:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=58194
(it has a workaround)

> > I personally think it is quite hard to make playing an album more
> > straightforward than pressing the big "Play album" button :)
> 
> Oh I'm not saying it's bad or anything - just that it's a bit more
> indirect.  When you launch Rhythmbox your albums are right there
> visible.  It's not necessarily clear that clicking "Play Album" will let
> you pick from your collection and then play.  (By the way, you should
> add an ellipsis there to help make clear there's more to the action).

If it's not immediately clear, the user will figure out as soon as he
clicks that button, and then remember forever after. And I think that
even *if* the user is puzzled by the lack of direct album presentation,
he will soon start to reach for the "Play album" button see what it is
about. But I don't think new users necessarily expect everything to be
right there in the main window immediately, that's only an expectation
created by using Rhythmbox/iTunes. (And WinAMP/XMMS to some extent, for
people not using multiple playlists anyway)

I don't think toolbar buttons should have elippsis, or at least I have
yet to see it anywhere (correct me if I'm wrong). I tried doing it a
while ago; looks odd, too .. 

> > 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-
> 
> As an alternative to a playlist, you could just select your Jazz and
> Classical genres with multiselection, and hit Play.

But how many people know that you can do multiselection by holding
Ctrl/Shift? I definitely don't call that obvious. (Even I didn't think
of it, and I wrote the damn thing from scratch)

> > I think they are approximately equally big groups of people. 
> 
> Ok, without more scientific data I guess we won't know, but my
> experience is definitely different.

A lot depends on the kind of people you know of course. If you're mostly
hanging out with other computer literate folks, you're likely to see a
LOT of music playing people, yes .. 


Jorn