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

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

>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.

Totem is a video player in its heart, not a music player. If Rhythmbox has
"usage problems" in its current incarnation as you said, Totem has many more
as an audio player, because its main purpose and design was materialized
around the target of becoming a video player. That reason alone constitues
the need for a dedicated music/audio player on Gnome.

>I mean, having a full blown music playback application in an office
workstation seems a little out of place.

I respectfully disagree. For example, take away my husband's media player
while he's coding at work and he'll come after you. I can't live without
WinAMP either, it's on 24/7, streaming Eurodance from www.DI.fm ;-)

People who mostly get Gnome installed in their workplace/school are
computer-related professionals and students. I  imagine many of them wanting
Internet radio (that Muine lacks), or better playlist features (that Totem
lacks). In fact, most of the times, companies that allow their employees to
listen to music while working, they have dedicated mp3 streaming servers (my
ex-company in UK used to, for example).

Regarding the "full blown application", this doesn't matter. As long the app
can be minimized in the notification area (like Muine also does), or it has
a "mini mode" (that iTunes, WMP, WinAMP, Rhythmbox have), this application
stops being a "full blown app" in the eyes of the user (even if it still
is). It's out of the way, it plays music on the background, and it doesn't
get in the way while having a screen full of terminals and VIMs with source
code... I would agree with you if the music player in question would be as
slow and heavy as iTunes is (e.g. 36 MBs of RAM vs 7 MBs of WinAMP and 9 MB
of WMP).

>In my opinion having a well-integrated, separately available package (or
packages! who says
>that in this case one has to be "chosen") is a lot better.  (Something like
an "Install music playback software" >checkbox in your distro's installer)

This will never work. Linux distros are not going to change their
installation procedure for something like that. BSDs won't either, Solaris
won't either. You are overestimating as to what distro makers are willing to
do, most of the time they just rely on stock gnomes and kdes (exclude Red
Hat, Sun and Novell). That's why whatever the default of gnome is, it has to
be good. Most OS makers simply don't bother with extra
configurations/additions. I mean look, most of them don't even ship the
Gnome language bindings, which are "official" gnome team of packages...

>In my opinion a small, clean, separate internet radio application would be
a lot better.

That's like saying that RTF should not be supported by Microsoft Word,
because in its heart, it is a lot like HTML, and HTML is not a document
format, but a descriptive language for documents. But for the user, it is
the exact same thing and they expect their music player to be able to stream
(even if the coder will need to use a hack). In our case, it's all audio
playback. Most of the users simply don't care about the distinction, even if
there is a technical distinction underneath. By your logic, Totem should
stop streaming video as well then. ;-)

In conclusion, I don't deny that Rhythmbox has problems still, but I believe
it is an app that people are familliar with (because of iTunes, even) and
it's more versatile than Muine, and also an audio player should be a
must-have part of Gnome, IMHO. If a "full blown music player" like  iTunes
was not an application that people would want to use, it wouldn't make front
page everyday on news sites.

Having said that, I love Mono and I love the design of Muine (and I do use
Muine). But looking at the situation realistically, Muine has even less
features than Rhythmbox (and currently you don't recommend GStreamer with
it) and Mono is not welcome or even ported on some OSes that Gnome can run
(e.g. BSDs have porting problems regarding Mono). These two factors, would
make Rhythmbox a better candidate for 2.8 *at this point in time* -- that
is, if the Gnome Project feels the need for a music player in its default
packages.

Rgds,
Eugenia