Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Noise or How I learned to love the state of the Gnome audio software

[Jonathan Matthew <notverysmart gmail com>]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 11:35:12AM -0500, Christian Page wrote:
> This information is reposted from my blog
> (http://mudfuckingfly.blogspot.com/2008/08/noise-or-how-i-learned-to-love-state-of.html)
> 
> Sending to the mailing list in addition because I am a nobody in the
> world of Blarghs. Please I ask you to not cut down my person, I am
> only trying to offer constructive critiquing of Rhythmbox in regard to
> the other top audio players on Gnome. I do realize that my particular
> use of this software is different then others, however this does not
> make my use irrelevant.
> 
> -------
> 
> This was originally posted to a bug report
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=327254) but it seams that
> either this is not worthy of noise, or the Rhythmbox developers would
> rather argue and not fix something, then accept real critiquing of the
> software they develop.

It's a bug report.  Comments on bug reports need to be concise and on topic,
and your comment was neither.  It was much more appropriate for the mailing
list, and I probably should have said so.

> I have a very large music library, I have spent years looking for the
> perfect audio manager for my library, and though there has been great
> progress, I still don't feel like we are there yet. I very much
> dislike having to micromanage what is playing, I have spent enough
> time hand picking what goes into my music collection, that I care less
> about which album or song is playing, and more about the music just
> never stopping. Sort of a perfect radio station, if you will.

I think this is a pretty common use case.
 
> As of late, what I have the most desire for is along the lines of what
> Charbucks has been working on over at http://undamped.blogspot.com
> called "In The Mood". I have not been able to test this out, but I
> understand it to be along the lines of the music genome project
> used by Pandora.
> 
> I have used last.fm suggestions supported by various players, but this
> dynamic playlist support leaves something to be desired. What I have
> found is that all suggestions lead to mainstream artists/songs and at
> some point stops offering suggestions of my obscure music.

I agree.  The user-generated nature of last.fm's relationships between artists
(and it's tagging) seems to distort the information it gathers.
 
> Rhythmbox, very basic though it has lots of functionality that other
> audio players do not. Lacks some very major features that I have come
> to expect, including, dynamic playlist generation (I am not talking
> about smart playlists), has poor tagging support, Play Queue doesn't
> function as expected (as described in the above mentioned bug report).

The play queue doesn't function as *you* expect.  It works exactly as I
expect, and I think that if you want the shuffle/repeat settings to
apply to the play queue, you're probably not using it the way it's designed
to be used.  Otherwise, I agree.
 
> Lastly, Jonathan Matthew pointed out that the bug report is not my
> blog, and I agree. I don't consider myself to be a blogger, and I feel
> the level of quality to make a factual blog entry is quite a lot of
> work. I am now talking to the world who might not understand half of
> what is being said here so I feel I have to provide links to facts and
> the software mentioned to make my point, where when I comment in
> bugzilla I am talking directly to the developers.

You're talking directly to the developers about a specific topic,
and we appreciate it when you stick to that topic.
 
> In either case, he is right and I was wrong. This doesn't change the
> fact that we have a long way to go to make the Gnome desktop kick all
> other desktop ass. I felt I was providing a very deep idea, I felt
> that all I got was a very shallow response.

I'm not sure what sort of response you're expecting.  You're (mostly)
right; what now?