[Rhythmbox-devel] Re: A whole bunch of stuff

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

> * Sorting isn't as functional as I would like. I want to be able to

> sort my library by artist, year and then track number. I'm sure
> there's people who want to sort by a crazy combination of stuff. This
> is actually an issue for me in more programs than just RB, so maybe
> it's more a problem with gtklistview.

The tracks are sorted according to a group of functions defined in
rb-entry-view.c. In theory we could make it user-definable what sorting
by a particular column means, however that would require some kind of
funky "redefine sorting" dialog and the like. I'm not sure if we want to
add that, or if there is a non-horrible UI for doing it.

If there isn't an easy way to do this there should be. Sorting a list by more than one category at once isn't a proper crazy wish.

> * I don't like how the artist name and album are links to last.fm. [..]

There seems to be lots of different ideas about what they should do.
Personally I think we should either a) make the text not do anything, or
b) make it pop up a "artist/album info" window, which can have lookup on
last.fm/google music/wikipaedia/whatever buttons and a "browser this
artist/album" button etc.

I think the menu/window idea is good. I would go for a dropdown menu or something since it would be more convenient than a window.

> * A "jump to song" text entry/dialog. In XMMS sometimes I would decide
> I wanted to a certain song so I would hit J, type enough of the name
> to distinguish it from all the other songs and hit enter. I didn't
> even need the screen to be on. The current search box really doesn't
> satisfy this since I don't want to lose whatever subset of the library
> I'm playing, I just want to jump to a song within it.

If you want to choose the track by title, you can do this by selecting
the entry view (e.g. clicking in it) and then typing - GtkTreeView's
type-ahead searching does it automagically. If you want something more
complex such as searching for an artist, or temporarily limiting the
tracks lists this won't be enough.

Heh this is something I didn't think of. It has the problem that if I type in a song title it will only ever reach the first, whereas xmms would have a box where I could select which song with that title I wanted. BUT then I realised that is basically what the search box does!
Having thought about this a lot, perhaps all I'm really after is a "clear filters" button which I know has been brought up before. My motive in all this is, I want to be able to select songs as easily as possible. In xmms I could do this with one hand on the keyboard and the screen turned off. That's basically what I'm ranting about.

> * Ctrl+arrows would be better for skip than alt. First off that would
> match Ctrl+space better. Second altgr doesn't work, it has to be left
> alt, so it takes two hands to skip a song. Which is more annoying than
> you'd think.

We actually changed the keys from Ctrl-arrows to Alt-arrows not that
long ago. The reasoning behind that was that Alt-arrows are the
"recommended" keys for applications to use for next/forward and
previous/back. This also lets people (who have the right kind of mouse)
to bind the side buttons on their mouse to Alt-Left and Alt-Right and
have it be next/previous in all their applications.

I was thinking of not letting this go until I realised I have two weird extra keys on my keyboard that function as alt+left and alt+right. So I guess this isn't an issue for me personally. I think ctrl+arrows would be better since it's an easier combination to press but if rhythmbox is following HIG guidelines or whatever, this isn't the right place to whine about it anyway.

I have to say I'm encouraged by where this project is headed. I guess now I get to take my list of stuff and add it all into bugzillla. There's a few actual bugs I've found that I'm going after as well.