[Rhythmbox-devel] Feedback: a couple suggested features

[Joey Dodson <ninjawailer gmail com>]

Hey all,

I'm not on the dev list, as I currently don't have much programming
experience. However, I thought I'd compliment you guys on the project
and give a couple suggestions. If you don't want/need suggestions,
then please ignore this email.

1. Editing song information
This is probably the single most troublesome aspect of using Rythmbox.
It currently seems impossible to edit meta info for a song (am I
wrong?). Rythmbox could really use some ways to alter this
information. Ideally doing this should be saved in the file (though
that could be an option in preferences). This should be doable within
the music library. I hate to say this, but windows media player is a
good example of easy and convenient library management. If you select
a song and then click a field in the song it is possible to edit the
info for that song. Another nice feature of wmp is that using tab and
up/down arrows, you can navigate through the adjacent fields. For
example, I added some files from an album to my library, but the
artist information isn't there. I can then type the artist info into
track one, copy it, then hit down arrow then paste repeatedly to fill
in the whole album's artist info in a few seconds. Anyways, I really
think there are good arguments for implementing this feature sooner
rather than later. I'm sure with a bit of creativity it would be
entirely possible to outdo wmp's functionality here. :)

2. Visible column order
Selection of which columns will be visible and being able to change
their widths is a good start, but it would also be nice to be able to
select the order that they display in. This could be done a couple of
ways (doing both would be best, imo). The first is to be able to drag
them around by the top of the column. The second would be to replace
the check-boxes in the preferences with a list in which you could
add/remove columns and change their order. It's kind of a pet peeve of
mine to see genre information in between the song and the artist. I
know everyone has their own preferences with respect to this.

3. Song continuity
This one is seriously not very important, but would be pretty cool. My
thought was that it would nice if switching to a playlist didn't stop
the current song if that song is in the playlist. Maybe there could be
a notification and a preference taken with this action. Basically if
I'm playing a song from my whole library, but then I decided I only
want to listen to a particular playlist (which that song happens to be
included in) it would be possible to just keep playing that song and
then after that song finishes then go into the rest of the playlist
following that song.

Anyways, just a few ideas. Overall, I really enjoy Rythmbox and think
in some key ways it's better than wmp. Kudos to the developers!

Feel free to email me off list if you'd like, but as I said I'm not on
the list and won't see any on-list responses.

Best,
Joey Dodson