Playlists [Re: [Usability] Some usability feedback]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

> Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 14:49:17 +0100 (CET)
> From: Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>
> To: GNOME Usability List <usability gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Some usability feedback
>
> On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Mariano Suárez-Alvarez wrote:
>
> > Actually, burning data and burning music are tasks so different that
> > it'd be really strange to have them anywhere tied together.
>
> I see where you're coming from, but I don't completely buy the argument.
> When I have a folder filled with ogg files, it will have a context menu
> allowing me to add it to the Rhythmbox library. When opened,
> gst-thumbnailer will give them sound icons and at some point I even got
> to hear the song itself when I hovered my mouse pointer over it. The
> point being, GNOME apparently *recognizes* that we're dealing with music
> files here. So how is it *not logical* to start burning an audio CD when
> dragging these files to burn:/// or selecting a few and rightclick >
> burn to CD?
>
> > What we need is a user level notion of a playlist, which can be created,
> > edited, played, and burnt onto cds, and so on. This tasks would be done
>
> Good idea. Bastien, do you think it is feasible to have a shared (fd.o?)
> playlist format for all (GNOME) multimedia apps?

Rather than come up with a whole new standard I think one could probably
pick from existing standards.

Music players seem to widely support .pls and .m3u already

I've always fancied using (a very simple subset of) the SMIL Standard [1]
for playlists but that only really worked with RealPlayer (and to a lesser
extent Quicktime).  Unfortunately using the RealPlayer SMIL support for
simple playlist was fairly clunky because their implementation was really
full SMIL presentations and they had seperate more simple formats for
Playlists (I made some picture flipbooks too, and some simple
presentations that mixed stills and video).  Microsoft ASX was simple and
effective but not something you could standardize on (although I expect
some media players will want to support it) and the XML playlist format
from Winamp didn't spread beyond winamp.

While there are lost of other formats that could be used for playlists I
still believe SMIL is the most promising as it has plenty of room for
expansion and unlike other formats it has a decent chance of reaching a
wideer audience as it is a format that Real and Apple have already shown
at least a small amount of interest in.

It has been a while since I've played around with multimedia in any depth
so I'm sure the gnome-multimedia people will have plenty more interesting
and up to date ideas on the subject.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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