Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] radio

[Artem Baguinski <femistofel gmail com>]

On 25/10/05, Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin hn org> wrote:
> 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?

it is working on local songs (it shows "MM:SS of MM:SS" both correct).
doesn't work on radios.

> 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.

thanks.

> > (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.

OK

> > (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.

thanks

> 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.

of course one could make sense of the useless garbage! displaying it
is useless, but considering it when filtering ("search" functionality)
is definitelly useful.

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

Whenever I'll succeed in convincing rb / gstreamer play all streams
I'm listening to at the moment using realplayer and mplayer, I'll have
a list large enough to wanna filter it now and then. I never have
"styles" thing open (unless I want to discuss it on a list) though and
I won't be using it. What I'd find useful though (for streams as well
as files) is being able to assign a list of keywords to each entry and
being able to filter by them http://del.icio.us/ kinda way. (I thought
musicbrainz had osmething similar, no?). I would then "tag" streams by
country and language like other user would "tag" by genre or style or
whatever. Tags cloud, like http://flickr.com/photos/tags/ could then
be handy.

But may be this is more a sort of functionality for the beale (at
least the search / tag cloud parts).