Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Suggestions from a newbee

[Mika Wahlroos <mpw iki fi>]

Hi,

First of all, I'm not a Rhythmbox developer but have been following the 
list for a while. While I can't give a direct solution to either of the 
things you want, perhaps I can give some kind of an explanation about 
how things are generally seen.

dref no-log org wrote:
> I just want to suggest you a "repeat" fonction that 
> allows simply to repeat only one track, instead of the whole selection.

This may not be a very good tip if you want to do that often but if you 
only do that occasionally, you could of course just create a playlist 
with only that single track and then play the list with the shuffle and 
repeat options enabled. That should keep playing the same track. If not, 
try the same without the shuffle option -- I can't remember exactly how 
having shuffle enabled affects the behaviour of the repeat mode.

As far as I remember there has been some discussion about reworking the 
shuffle and repeat modes or at least their user interface to something 
clearer and more intuitive. I can't remember if the discussion also 
included the kind of mode you're suggesting.

> The other point would be about appearence : I didn't find anything to 
> change it, and to make it look a bit more "iTunes like", does one of you 
> plan to develop skins possibility ?

Probably not. Rhythmbox is a Gnome application and derives its looks 
from the Gnome theme settings so it looks generally the same as the 
other applications on the desktop. In other words, user interface 
widgets such as buttons and toolbars appear similar in all applications 
on the same desktop, and the looks of those can be changed by changing 
the desktop theme. In Gnome you'd go to System > Preferences > Themes, 
but I don't know about KDE.

Note that KDE and Gnome have separate themes for their applications so 
unless some kind of magic is used to make the themes look similar, Gnome 
applications on KDE will look a little out of place, and vice versa. I 
don't know how Kubuntu behaves with regard to the looks of Gnome 
applications by default.

It's generally good to have a consistent look with the desktop (i.e. 
with the other applications) unless there's a very compelling reason to 
look different. If Rhythmbox looks ugly or something, it's probably 
either because the layout of the application is bad (I'm not suggesting 
that it actually is) or because the UI theme for Gnome applications is 
bad. The former case probably wouldn't be fixable by skins, and the 
latter case affects all Gnome applications and the correct fix would be 
to apply a better theme for them, not by making the whole thing even 
less consistent by having separate skins for all applications.

I believe that if Rhythmbox simply looks bad on your system, it's 
possible that you just don't have a good theme set for Gnome (or GTK) 
applications. I can't remember how to set GTK themes so that they work 
on KDE so I can't help you with that right now, but you may want to try 
installing the gtk-qt-engine package which should make GTK (and thus 
also Gnome) applications look more similar with the other applications 
on the KDE desktop. Look for a package with that name for example in 
Synaptic Package Manager.

If, on the other hand, Rhythmbox doesn't really look bad but you'd just 
like it to look like iTunes, well, Rhythmbox isn't iTunes. ;-) 
Personally I wouldn't want the music player to stand out from the rest 
of the system since I see no compelling reason for it to look different. 
As for iTunes, I believe Apple's compelling reason for making it look 
inconsistent with the rest of the system (at least on Windows) is 
branding, not usability.

If you want to make Rhythmbox look a little sleeker, the first thing I'd 
try would be to go to "Edit" > "Preferences" and set toolbar button 
labels to "Icons only". Also, the version of Rhythmbox in (K)ubuntu is a 
little old, and some changes for example in the icons have been made in 
the development version since then. For comparison you can see the way 
0.10.0 (shipped with Ubuntu 7.04) looks on my desktop [1] and the 
appearance of the latest development snapshot on the same system and 
configuration [2]. Note that I'm running this on Gnome, not KDE.

[1] http://cs.helsinki.fi/u/mwahlroo/images/temp/rhythmbox/rb-0.10.0.png
[2] 
http://cs.helsinki.fi/u/mwahlroo/images/temp/rhythmbox/rb-svn-20070916.png

Regards,
Mika