Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your email, and apologies for my late reply - I've been really busy with college work lately. I wanted to know how to use the RB.BrowserSource for an idea I had for a rating filter plugin for Rhythmbox (I'll get to this in a bit). Long story short, I found some time during the week to sit down and have a think about it week and realised I'd taken a rather hamfisted approach to the problem I was trying to tackle. I've since tried a new approach and everything seems to be working now - no need to tap into the RB.BrowserSource after all... I'm going to bug test it for a few more days and, after, I'll post download links on the Rhythmbox third party plugins page.
I'll try to give a brief explanation of the whys and hows of a rating filter: I have lots of automatic playlists (e.g. 1960s Music, Recently Added,
Recently Played), and I often want to listen to either my favourite
tracks or some random unrated tracks from those playlists. This could
be, for instance, all the unrated tracks from my 1990s Music playlist
(when I'm in the mood to listen to something new), or favourites I've
recently played (when I'm not). Sure, I could go create a load of
automatic playlists, but it's laborious, and if I wanted to listen to my
favourite Bowie tracks, or my favourite Bjork tracks, etc, I'd have to
create a new playlist for each artist, and clutter up my playlists tree.
To appease my inner pedant, I decided I'd try to code up a rating
filter. Rather than add a new column to the library browser (not that I have any idea how to do this), I thought
it would be cleaner to add three self-explanatory buttons to the bar
above the browser: Favourites, Unrated and All. I reasoned that this
would meet most people's needs, without cluttering up the display too
much:
Hopefully, my layout and spelling choices won't offend too many people. If you enable the plugin, the new buttons appear in the main music library and on manual and automatic playlists. You can also set the threshold for determining what rating constitutes a favourite using the plugin preferences manager. I count anything greater than or equal to four stars, but it's probably a controversial opinion.