Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] radio

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin hn org>]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 11:13:23AM +0200, Artem Baguinski wrote:
> some notes about radio - wanted to discuss them together before filing as bugs
> 
> (1) time displayed in a tray icon's hint is some random "garbage", no?
> not that radio time is relevant

For me, it's showing how long I've been playing the station.  Is the
time displayed when playing local songs similarly broken, or is it just
when playing a stream?

> (2) rb sees new songs on radios that send that information (btw how is
> that done? is radio stream a single stream that just has tags packet
> now and then, or is it a cat of streams?) Would have been nice if a
> tray bubble with new song info appeared when new song's detected.

For mp3 streams, the stream name and genre and the name of the playing
song are sent as shoutcast metadata, which (as far as I remember) is
like a set of HTTP headers inserted into the stream every now and then.
Ogg streams change logical bitstreams and send new tags when the song
changes.

This information also needs to be accessible through the dbus interface
somehow, preferably in the same form as the existing song information.

> (3) if i drag an url onto rb and then play the radio it would discover
> the title / genre. if I add the radio via menu it asks me to enter
> them and won't even procede if i enter no title. i find that somewhat
> inconsistent

I'm sure I had a patch that fixed this (and populated the genre drop
down menu with the genres of your existing streams), but I don't know
where it went.  Please file a bug and I'll try to dig up the patch.

> (4) my radios list is ordered by title. after i dragged a bunch of
> urls onto rb it sorted by url (because their titles were urls) and
> then if i play radio its title is discovered and it gets resorted,
> which is OK. but then the list selection stays at the old radio
> position selecting some other radio, which I find a bit confusing. but
> in fact I'd like them be ordered by url without url being visible
> (handy for keeping soma.fm radios together ;-))

I've opened bug #319718 and attached a patch for the reorder/selection
thing.

> (5) all radios in my list treat "genre" field as a sort of fuzzy space
> delimited list. fuzzy because "Drum and Bass Jungle" is a list of two
> entries. this clutters the genres list and more important makes it
> pretty useless as each "genre" ends up representing singe radio. [I
> use search atm to deal with that]. May be something could be done with
> genres to solve this? will musicbrainz support address this maybe? I
> don't have suggestions here.

I don't think there's any way we can make sense of the useless garbage
that most streams put in their genre tag, and I have no idea how
musicbrainz could possibly help.  If you edit the genre manually, it
won't get overwritten when you play the stream.

Does anyone actually have enough streams in their library to make
browsing by genre necessary or even helpful?