[Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Breakdown #2



Welcome to the 2nd issue of the Rhythmbox Breakdown, the kind-of-weekly
posting to let everyone know the juicy gossip from the world of
Rhythmbox.

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.



Approaching 0.9.2
-----------------

According to the currently-planned release schedule, we're aiming to get
0.9.2 out sometime around next weekend, or shortly after that.

Thing means that we need to begin a string freeze fairly soon, so that
the translators can update their translations. Because of this, anyone
who has patches that they want to get in to 0.9.2, which change strings
or UI, will need to let us know very soon.



Discussions on Rhythmbox-devel
------------------------------

Last weeks issue started off a lot of discussion about Rhythmbox's user
interface. The toolbar patch got a lot of focus, as it was one of last
week's bugs-of-the-week.


UI:

Most people seemed fairly receptive to the idea of using a toolbar,
although some people were concerned it would lead to the controls taking
up more space. The separation of the play/pause/stop buttons was though
to be a bad idea, which lead to an updated patch where there was a
single Play toggle button.

Another UI suggestion was that the "General" tab of the preferences
window could be removed. Currently it contains the check-boxes to
control whether certain columns are visible. The original suggestion
which some people liked was to have a "Visible Columns" item in the view
menu, which would bring up a window containing the check-boxes.
Alternative suggestions were adding a "Visible Columns" sub-menu to the
view menu, or context menu.

The removal of the column headers was also suggested, with sorting
controlled from a combo-box - which would leave more space for the track
listing. Several people didn't agree with this, because it would make it
less obvious what the columns were, especially in the case of the
browsers. It would also prevent anyone from resizing columns, and change
the "sort by clicking on column header" that works in most GTK
applications.

Once again the search box was brought up. As well as the usual
discussion about a clear button, there were suggestions of removing it
completely. While keeping the search box contents across session is bad
because it confuses a lot of users, it was felt that emptying it when
you look at a different source wasn't a good idea because it will change
what is being played.

Also discussed was the idea of making the browsers and the search box
mutually exclusive, as both working at once sometimes confuses users


Play Queue:

Jonathan Matthew send his much-anticipated updated version of the "play
queue" patch to the list for discussion. Although it still has some
quirks and minor bugs that need to ironed out, it works very well. This
will probably be one of the big features of 0.9.3.


Play orders:

Paul Boyd sent a patch to the list implement a "repeat one song" play
order, which prompted a short discussion on how to put this in the user
interface. The current version adds a "Play Order" sub-menu to the
control menu, which lets you access the new play order and all 7
existing ones (only 4 of which you could get to before). Hopefully this
will lead to people writing some new play orders, such as album-shuffle
or ones based on suggestions from AudioScrobbler.



Summary of Changes in CVS
-------------------------

One change that didn't get mentioned last week was a few small
improvement in tag-editing. The first is that Rhythmbox now checks the
new file to ensure that it is still readable by GStreamer, which should
prevent corruption of files. ID3 tag editing should work as well, and
has been tested by a few people without problems.


Support has also been added for using the year/date metadata from
tracks. Rhythmbox uses the full date internally, but only the year is
currently visible in the interface.

The New Radio Station command now uses the Station Information window,
and doesn't require you to enter a name or genre - which will be
automatically fetched.



Bugs of the Week
----------------

Bugs 140355 (authenticated gnome-vfs) and 312122 (column auto-sizing)
got mentioned last week, but no-one made any comments about them.


Bug 315389, add "Move to Trash" command:
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315389)

You can remove tracks you don't like from your library, but unless you
manually delete (or move) the files, they will be re-added if you import
the folder again to add new music. Deleting them yourself can be
difficult, because you have to find the file to delete it.

The patch on this bug adds a "Move to Trash" command to the edit menu
and the context menu on tracks, which aim to make deleting tracks you
don't like much easier. The patch works well, although currently has
issues if you don't have permission to remove the file, or put it in the
trash.




That's it for this week, so go download cvs head, break it and
file bugs. Also remember to try out the patches and see if you like
them, and they work for you

-- 
James "Doc" Livingston

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