Re: Introducing Muine, Rhythmbox in 2.8 and other things

[Shaun ONeil <shaun dog-berry com>]

On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 13:25 +0200, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In this mail I'd like to introduce the Muine music player[1], and touch
> a few issues regarding inclusion of a (any) music player in GNOME 2.8.

Thanks to the wsdl hint, I'm finally running this .. and very impressed.

A couple of things not mentioned in your proposal that stand out to me
me ("me" being 'a random, geeky, non-professional desktop user) ..

A big blank playlist was a little odd to be greeted with.  Is there any
way this could contain 'what next' information when it's not populated.
ie "your playlist and library are both empty .. you might wanna _Import
Folder_".  I'm not sure if this is a plus or a minus on usability, but
some kind of hint somewhere would be nice imho.

I took many clicks to figure out the tray icon.  I think it's a fairly
familiar concept that when I left-click an icon, something happens, and
when I right-click an icon, I get a context menu.  middle-click is move.
  Having both left & right bring up the context menu was a little
confusing, and I discovered middle-click = Show Window by accident.

Past that .. I love this thing :o)  I can't wait to see CD
import/burning.  I use my file manager to get files to and from CDs, so
having my 'music manager' put music to and from CDs seems a reasonable
expectation (ie, not clutter).

> - Backend
> 
> Muine currently defaults to using a xine-lib backend. Using GStreamer
> would be a lot nicer obviously, but there currently are a couple of
> issues preventing it from being used succesfully in Muine. Details can
> be found on this page:
> http://huizen.dds.nl/~jbaayen/gstreamer-problems.html.

fwiw, using gstreamer backend (0.8.1) with osssink (alsa /w oss emulation). not a problem in sight.

Thanks for a great app,
  Shaun