Re: audioconvert! the new super script to convert audio files! would you like to include it?

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 02:06 +0200, Samuel Abels wrote: 
> Am Freitag, den 05.08.2005, 04:17 +0200 schrieb edoardo:
> > recently i made a nautilus script that allows you to convert audio files 
> > by right-clickin' on'em from nautilus.
> > 
> > i was wonderin' if you guys might have wanted to include it in the next 
> > official gnome release.
> 
> Though the script is probably useful for many people I believe that in
> GNOME we have a general consensus that technical details should not be
> exposed to the user, whenever possible. That also includes file formats
> such as OGG, FLAC or mp3. If a requirement to convert a format does come
> up (e.g. through hardware player constraints) the applications that
> interface with this hardware should be fixed to automatically convert
> the format accordingly, so that the user is not confronted with the
> format at all.
> Thus, I believe your script is a great enhancement, but it should not be
> included in the GNOME default release for the above reasons.

I would generally agree about the technical details argument. However,
there is no single piece of hardware that plays all arbitrary audio
formats at this time, in terms of portable audio players. MP3 is very
widely known now, for example, and pretty much all portable digital
audio players do support it. Very few support OGG/Vorbis, and even
less support FLAC.

Having said that, I've not yet seen the original e-mail, and have not
googled to find the software in question, so have yet to try it.
However, I still am not sure that nautilus scripts is the best UI for
doing something which may be so important to the user. Converting the
audio when the user chooses to sync it to their hardware device, in
the music library application, is definitely not the way to do it
though. I have a 60GB iPod, and would certainly not want to wait for
the amount of time it would take to convert 60GB of my OGG files, to
MP3. I also would not want the software to assume that the iPod does
not support OGG, either. It may not do so officially, but I do intend
to install iPodLinux on it, so that I can just use OGGs directly.

-- dobey