Re: Introducing Muine, Rhythmbox in 2.8 and other things

[Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>]

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 03:25 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > - CD ripping. It would be great to have a standardised place where to
> > store music (~/Music or something), where sound-juicer would dump its
> > ripped files by default and where Muine would pull its music from by
> > default.
> 
> Yes!  We should really standardize this for GNOME 2.8, especially since
> sound-juicer won't use Bonobo, and D-BUS isn't currently planned for
> 2.8.

Some comments:

Where to store music: ~/Music sounds like a great default, but GNOME is
slowly building up a set of "default locations" and no standard location
in GConf to define them.  If Muine started creating ~/Music when I have
a ~/Sounds/Music I'd like it to use, I'd be very upset. :)

Maybe the Epiphay (~/Downloads), Rhythmbox, Muine guys, with a random
sprinking of libgnome hackers, should sit down and decide a location in
gconf for setting "default" paths.  Then Sound Juicer could default to
the same location Rhythmbox/Muine will read from, and one day a HIGgy
file sharing client would automagically download into the same location
as Epiphany.

Sound Juicer/Bonobo/D-BUS: I'm not terribly keen on wrapping SJ in
Bonobo for two reasons:

1) I'm scared by CORBA in C
2) I don't really see the use.  The interface we all know and love as
Sound Juicer is just a front-end to an extraction library.  Muine and
Rhythmbox are free to wrap this with their own  UI -- I'd imagined it
integrating rather well with the was-once-working CD source in
Rhythmbox.

There is work to be done: the extractor object itself probably needs
more love, and some of the utility functions which SJ uses (i.e
transforming the track metadata into filenames) should be moved into it,
and of course it actually needs to be installed as a library on disk.

And now some random points:

> > 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 feel that Totem is a far better fit for the role of "GNOME Desktop
media player".  Yes, it has relatively poor support for playlists and
metadata, but it's no worse than XMMS which we all lived with for
years. :)  Also Rhythmbox/Muine work very well for a well-tagged music
collection, but what about when I want to listen to some cool sound
effects I just downloaded I want to use in my presentation?

Totem is primarily a movie player, but at it's heart it's a *media*
player, whereas Muine and Rhythmbox are *music* players.

Ross