Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] [patch] music as desktop service

[Eric Larson <elarson novell com>]

Hello,  

> Now an implementation detail one could be concerned about now is that
> Rhythmbox takes up a lot of memory when it's running.  I bet this
> (along
> with getting the library saved) are the reasons people actually want
> to
> quit Rhythmbox.  But both of those are just *bugs* in this model.

I think this deals with a core issue with Rhythmbox as well as other
applications that deal with organizing large amounts of user files. The
essential issue are there are two primary uses cases regarding music
files. These cases can be seen, but are not limited to, in the
iPod/iTunes usage. 

The first part is organization. iTunes does a good job of making
playlists which is just another way of essentially performing queries on
database of sorts. You create a playlist based off of things like
artist, genre, etc.. While you may or may not actually export this
playlist, you still are merely organizing your songs. 

The second part is playing the organized song lists. Apple moves this to
the iPod but the same could be true for Rhythmbox (or other media apps
for that matter, i.e. F-Spot for pictures, Nautilus/OpenOffice.org for
documents, etc.). The problem with Rhythmbox (and why I currently don't
use it very much) is that it is too much for simply playing music. 

I would rather have a simple player that I can easily use for playing my
playlists created in Rhythmbox. Then when I make my default player
Rhythmbox and I download a quick song from the Internet I don't have to
waste the time integrating it into my Music Library. I can listen to it
and see if I like it. If I do I can easy import it to my library where I
then have the option of adding it to playlists or groups. 

I realize this might be something rather extreme and non-trivial to do,
but I think this model is becoming much more important to the Desktop as
a whole. Computers have given people the ability to create massive
amounts of "things" such as music, photos, and documents. The problem
then is organizing it. Rhythmbox deals with organizing music in a
fantastic way but it has suffered as a simple music play because of it.
I don't have any suggestions regarding how to accomplish this. My only
point was to hopefully get people thinking about this kind of issue as
it is involved in other projects with GNOME. 

Finally, a huge thank you goes out to everyone on the Rhythmbox team for
doing great work and creating one of the best music players around.
Thanks!

Eric