[Rhythmbox-devel] MP3 device full handling

[Brian J. Murrell <brian interlinx bc ca>]

So here I am trying to write a short bit of instructions (complete with
screenshots, etc.) for my mom to show her how to copy music from her Rhythmbox
managed music archive to her MP3 player.

It's all pretty straightforward until she has a full MP3 player.  At this
point, Rhythmbox is very unhelpful and un-user-friendly.  The problems are
many-fold.

Trying to drag and drop titles just yields (usually several) dialogs:

    Error Transferring Track
    Could not write to resource.

Is my mom supposed to know what this means?  Not likely.  But let's pretend she
does so we can move on to the next problem(s).

So she has figured out from that very clear error displayed that her MP3 player
is full.  And, yes, she can select her MP3 player in RB and see on the bottom
left how much music on there in terms of songs, time and space used (i.e. 594
songs, 1 day 14 hours and 35 minutes, 3.5GB).  But what does that mean to her? 
What's a "GB"?  It tells her how much she has used but not a clue how much
space is free.  Oh wait.  When she bought it, the package said it was a 4GB
player.  So she has .5G free still.  Why is RB complaining?  You get the picture.

So let's assume she some how at this point has decided she needs to remove some
stuff from her MP3 player to put the new tracks on.  But how many existing
songs does she need to delete?  Oh simple.  The same number of minutes as the
tracks she wants to add.  Of course to us geeks, we know this is wrong.  It's
not very easy to even figure out how many minutes the songs she's selected to
copy takes up, but I will cover that in more detail below... 

So let's say she gets past the incongruence between minutes and bytes and knows
that she needs to remove enough existing tracks to free up the number of bytes
that her new songs require.  How many bytes do her new songs require?  She has
selected (through the magic of CTRL and/or SHIFT and mouse clicks) the songs
she wants to copy.  Nowhere is it visible how many minutes, nor how many bytes
that selection requires.  And that's not even taking into account that the
result of the transcoding required to meet the MP3 player's requirements might
be different than the source tracks.

Yes, she could create a new playlist and put the desired tracks into it to get
a list of song count, time and space, but again, this does not address the
issues with pre and post transcoding differences.  And having to add the steps
to create a playlist and then delete it just to get an accounting is, well, just
silly.

So as you can see, there is a huge hole in the usability of RB for the non-geek
crowd.

What I think needs to happen is that when a list of tracks is selected and
copied to an MP3 player (with possible transcoding) an ENOSPC needs to be dealt
with by providing the user with an opportunity to remove (enough) tracks to
allow the copy to succeed.  Perhaps something like:

  Your MP3 does not have enough space to copy the selected tracks.
  Please choose tracks to delete to free up the space required by the new
  tracks:

  <list of tracks with checkboxes -- or some other selection tool>

  [ ---------------------   progress meter[1] ------------------------ ]

                                        [ OK ] [ Cancel ]

[1] The progress meter is a 0-100% and reflects the amount of space
    needed by the new tracks.  The user continues to select tracks from
    the list until the progress meter goes to 100% (or more).  The OK
    button should probably be greyed out until enough space has been made
    available.

Thots?

b.