[Rhythmbox-devel] Various questions from a new user...

[Derek Cramer <cramerd gmail com>]

Greetings all.
I have just started using Rhythmbox (in FC3) because of problems with 
Xmms/BMP. I have a few questions about whether I can make rb fit my 
music listening model.
First off, if any of these qualify as rtfm questions, can someone please 
point me at the fm? Other than the integrated help and the on-line FAQ, 
I can't find enough documentation on-line to answer these questions.
I am a long time user of xmms, and my listening habits are as follows: I 
rip all my own albums to Ogg, of which I have about 250. This is just 
over 2500 songs, that are all in one huge playlist. I use imms (2.0.2a) 
with the player on shuffle. I also use xosd and audioscrobbler plugins. 
All of my  collection is replaygain tagged (mp3gain for the few mp3s).
Now, here's where I have some problems.

Replaygain: Where does one enable it within rb? I can find no option. It 
may be automatic, but it sounds like it is disabled.

Adaptive listening/imms: I finally found the rate automatically option 
in rb, so I would just like to clarify how the rb model correlates to 
the imms model. If I leave the player on shuffle, it will presumably 
adjust the song ratings according to whether a song is played 
through/skipped. Does it use this information to select the next song, 
or do I need to do something to achieve this?  Also, does it take into 
account audio correlations between songs as imms does? I see that the 
songs have only 5 levels of rating. Is there any plans/way to increase 
this, as it would increase the granularity of the ratings. Rating as a 
percentage would seem to be an idea here, intuitive, and more accurate. 
I never rate songs manually, I only care for it in that it allows the 
player to choose songs I am likely to want to hear. I saw something 
on-line somewhere about someone maybe writing an imms 2 plugin for rb, 
as imms 2 is not tied to any particular player. This is attractive to 
me, because I could use my existing imms database, and also because I 
just like the way it works (and it does work).

Queuing/manually selecting: Sometimes I like to jump to a particular 
song, but I always queue it to play after the current one. Is this 
possible in rb?

Plugins: The only ones I have thus far seen are the rbscrobbler and 
rbosd (which I haven't gotten to work yet). the thing is, they seem to 
be standalone programs, rather than plugins as such. Is there any way to 
get rb to load these automatically, or must it always be done manually 
as a separate step?

One other thing I noticed, that may be rb, or it may be Gstreamer - 
under load, the audio tends to break up and skip. This is an absolute 
no-no. Is this common, and is there any workaround?

Other than these issues, rb seems like an excellent music player. Maybe 
my usage style would suit a different player though, so I'll gladly 
accept suggestions on that too...

--
Regards,
Derek.