This is the 1st issue of the Rhythmbox Breakdown. It's main goal is to impersonate Wine Weekly News, but also serves to inform you of what's happening in the world of Rhythmbox. This will hopefully become a regular posting, that lets everyone know the latest juicy gossip. For those who read the rhythmbox-devel mailing list it will give a summary of activity, and provide information about things that haven't (yet) been discussed on the list. For those who don't read rhythmbox-devel, it will let you know all the cool stuff that we've been up to. Road to 0.9.2 ------------- Since 0.9.1 came out there has been discussion about getting Rhythmbox back onto regular releases. The plan is to make a 0.9.x release approximately monthly, which should provide a balance between getting new features and improvements out to everyone, and being fairly stable. This puts us just over half way to the next version, so CVS shouldn't see any big new features landing before 0.9.2, but will get more polish, smaller improvements and bug fixes. Summary of changes since 0.9.1 ------------------------------ There have been quite a few features that have been committed in CVS since 0.9.1 was released, some of which have been in development for quite a while. Podcast Support: Thanks to the initial work by Renato Araujo, and improvements by variety of people, we now have support for downloading and listening to podcasts. As the 'net isn't a nice place to visit, there are probably podcast feeds that we don't handle properly. So everyone should subscribe to lots of podcasts, and tell us when they don't work. Audio CD Support: The patch for audio CD support by James Livingston that has been evolving for the past few months has been committed to cvs. As well as playback, it also does metadata lookup via MusicBrainz with code borrowed from Sound-Juicer. It doesn't do ripping yet, but probably will at some point in the future. AudioScrobbler Track Submission: Rhythmbox has gained native support for submitting the tracks you play to AudioScrobbler (last.fm), thanks to a patch by Ruben Vermeersch. It's not enabled by default, but pass --enable-audioscrobbler to configure, put your username/password in the preferences window and sit back and enjoy. Bugs of the week ---------------- There are several bugs that need discussion amongst the wider community, or have patches that need testing before they can be committed. Please try them out and start some discussion or report success/failure on the list. Bug 312122 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312122) Currently a lot of the areas where Rhythmbox is perceived to be slow is not due to the database backend, as a lot of people suspect, but in fact due to Rhythmbox trying to figure out the best size for all the entry view columns. This patch fixes that by making GTK not measure all the strings to auto-size the columns. The reason it hasn't been committed is that it might cause issues for some locales. In particular the date columns might be too thin in locales where the date-time isn't of the format "1/2/2005 12:34", or locales that use non-Arabic numerals. If you use such a locale, please test the patch and report whether the columns look okay or not. Bug 140355 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140355) Rhythmbox currently doesn't support authenticated gnome-vfs mounts that require user intervention, and trying to use them will hang or crash Rhythmbox. Because of this Rhythmbox disabled access to anything that gnome-vfs considers remote, even ones that don't require user intervention, such as sftp when using keys. The patch adds support for using gnome-vfs mounts that require authentication, such as a password or giving Rhythmbox access to the keyring. While this would be great to get into cvs, it will need considerable testing to ensure it doesn't break anything. Bug 316238 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316238) Toolbars are a good way of letting users find functionality, without having it buried in menus, and also be convenient to access. The patch attached to this bug moved the playback controls to a toolbar, along with the shuffle/repeat controls (currently in the status bar) and some other commands. The latest patch also splits the play, pause and stop actions into separate buttons, which will warrant some discussion. That's it for the first issue, so go download cvs head, break it and file bugs. Also remember to try out the patches and see what you think of them. -- James "Doc" Livingston <jrl ids org au>
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