[Rhythmbox-devel] thoughts on 0.5.2
- From: "Zack Weinberg" <zack codesourcery com>
- To: rhythmbox-devel gnome org
- Subject: [Rhythmbox-devel] thoughts on 0.5.2
- Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2003 16:38:26 -0700
thought I'd give rhythmbox a try, and here are some suggestions for
improvements, in rough decreasing order of importance.
1) I have a lot of music: the little indicator in the lower right hand
corner of the library says "6.0 days (2184 songs)". This is mostly
Ogg Vorbis format, with some MP3s. There is roughly 8.8GB of data.
Loading all this into the library took about ten minutes. Then I
discovered that I needed to put track number tags on all the oggs,
which took about five minutes with a shell one-liner, and then I
restarted rhythmbox so it would notice ... which took an hour and a
half, with the CPU pegged the whole time. At once point I applied
strace to one of the threads that was madly thrashing away, and saw
it issuing one-character read() system calls over one of the music
files. Granted this is not a normal thing to do, but it does make
for rather poor initial user experience. xmms by contrast can load
up the complete library in about a minute, and reread all the
metadata in another minute; it appears to be disk-bandwidth limited.
In ordinary use the program is just slow enough to be irritating,
without being too slow to be unusable. Scrolling the library, for
instance, flickers noticeably. Sometimes, if the window has been
hidden, it will take a few seconds to repaint. The search facility
_is_ unusably slow, presumably due to the cost of updating the
giant treeview pane on every keystroke. Dragging things from the
library to a playlist also causes half-second or so UI pauses.
Impressively, none of this makes the music skip.
I suppose this is a general "please make the UI lots faster" request.
2) There appears to be no way to reorder the entries in a playlist
arbitrarily. One may sort them, but that's all. This makes it
difficult to design 'mixtapes.'
3) My two cents on the panel icon: I would prefer an applet to a
notification area entry, simply because I would then be able to get
rid of the notification area, which I have no other use for.
Having the icon change to indicate whether music was playing or not
would be nice. Displaying the current track on hover is the right
thing. Maybe it could show time remaining too?
The current on-click behavior is lame. I would suggest that left
click should toggle pause, and right-click should pop up a menu
with the following entries, reading from screen edge inward: next,
previous, pause/play, show/hide window. (Screen-edge-inward is
important. The outermost entry is directly under the mouse when
the menu pops up, so it should be the second most commonly wanted
operation: 'next track'.)
I would find it useful to be able to get the main window unmapped
and entirely off the window list, but I can live with it as is.
4) Replay Gain support would be nice. This is partially a gstreamer
feature, but the controls need to be visible in the rhythmbox UI.
See http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/player.html for details
(their suggested dialog box is kind of cluttered, but gives you
the idea). Current xmms has this for ogg files and it's addictive.
5) Some playlist-control features I would really like to have: "play
this track next", "stop at the end of this track", and "never play
this track again" (which should leave the track in the library,
just marked specially, so I can get it back if I change my mind).
"Stop at the end of this track" would be useful to have on the
applet menu.
6) I miss the ability to sort the library on multiple columns. I'd
like to tell it to sort first by artist, then by album, then by
track. Sorting by artist seems to do this but only by accident.
I would also find sort-ignoring-leading-articles (a, an, the) useful.
7) I'd like to be able to reorder the columns in the library/playlist view.
8) Why does it spawn a new playback thread (and kill the old one) for
every track?
9) Any way it can avoid loading gstreamer plugins it's not using?
zw
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