Banshee Summit Notes

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

A prettier format is here:
http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/Banshee

Attendees
---------

Aaron Bockover 
Adam Israel 
Atsushi Enomoto 
Brad Taylor 
Brandon Hale 
Chris Toshok 
Duncan Mak 
Gabriel Burt 
Jeff Waugh (iPod data donation) 
Miguel de Icaza 
Mike Urbanski 
Jorge Castro 
Probably missed some folks

Topics Covered
--------------

The random list of excellence covered at the Banshee session at the 2006
Summit. 

* Discussed the configuration UI for the new multimedia profile support.
There was a good consensus that the interface here was simple enough and
exposes the required functionality necessary to adjust profile variables
(quality metrics, for example). 

* Would like to discuss the configuration and implementation of the
profile support for inclusion in the GNOME platform in the future. 

* Gabriel brought up the idea of previewing the settings, eg playing one
of your tracks and applying the settings to it in real time 

* Mentioned that in early 2007, we'll start investigating a port to
Windows and then OS X. Most pieces of Banshee should be either
relatively easy to port or can be easily disabled in an initial port to
just get the core running. 

* Discussion about new browsing and organization interfaces. 

* I would like to use tiles, which would pull in lots of contextual data
from the core and from web services (last.fm, musicbrainz) 

* Look into clutter for crazy sexy UI 
                
* Lots of talk on the utility and design of the play queue to come. This
blocks on needing a playback model (what to play next, random, linear
backwards history, etc.). 

* We do not want to change the existing double-click to play behavior 

* To append the queue, you can drag and drop, right click->append, or
hold the mouse down on a selection for a delay, emulating
interfaces/behavior available on digital audio players 
                
* We need to find some good internet radio sources, but the consensus
was that internet radio itself is really going away or is/can be
replaced effectively for the most part by podcasts and last.fm streams 

* There are NPR radio streams from local stations, but only Real and WM
streams from npr.org 

* Mike Urbanski demoed his sweet podcasting work, and discussed some
internal changes to the download core 

* Download core will be made a first-class object in Banshee.Base 

* Moving to HttpWebRequest, but there's some followup needed to bring
full 2.0 support into Mono 
                
* Currently Mike is using his own HTTP implementation due to Async
problems with HttpWebRequest 

* Miggy was eager to get that fixed - he promises ;-)
                        
* Look into not showing notifications on track change when Banshee has
focus 

* See if notifications can be canceled, so if changing tracks quickly,
notifications don't stack up (though this is not needed if we don't show
them when the user changes songs manually..)