Re: Introducing Muine, Rhythmbox in 2.8 and other things

[Lee Willis <lwillis plus net>]

On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 21:01 -0400, Mike Chavoustie wrote:
> Shaun ONeil wrote:
> > A big blank playlist was a little odd to be greeted with.  Is there any
> > way this could contain 'what next' information when it's not populated.
> > ie "your playlist and library are both empty .. you might wanna _Import
> > Folder_".  I'm not sure if this is a plus or a minus on usability, but
> > some kind of hint somewhere would be nice imho.
> 
> I agree here.  Even after importing a folder, your playlist remains 
> blank.  There's no status bar or confirmation that n songs were imported 
> , so that means I have to go set up a playlist.  Maybe a "what next" 
> dialog would help, but is that really standard?

We did originally have a "first time" dialog that tried to address the
problems you've encountered here, but we weren't entirely happy with it
(Part of the solution hinges on Jorn's hint in an earlier email about
having a standard Music directory - you might also like to check out
http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-February/003305.html). A nice
interface for this is one of the TODO items.

> I know this is really Rhythmbox feature, and we're trying to get away 
> from that with Muine, but a "view library" button, or even a status bar 
> at the bottom reporting how many songs are in my library seems 
> appropriate here.

I think most users don't need this taking up screen real estate all of
the time, the cases you would be interested would be:

- Confirmation that "x" albums, and "y" songs have been imported after
you've requested an import
- An "alert"(In some form) that new albums/songs have been added when
they're automatically detectedby muine

Am I right, or is there a reason you need to know how many albums/songs
you have all of the time?

> On another note, I've noticed 2 things about importing folders:
> 
> 1)  If you import a folder, and then add songs to it afterward, Muine 
> doesn't update your folder contents, and you have to re-add the folder 
> to get the files.  I've done it on the fly (with Muine still open), and 
> after closing and re-opening Muine.

Muine will re-check the folder you imported on startup. It does this in
the background to improve performance so you may have been too quick for
it!. Noticing of new files on the fly while muine is running is in the
TODO but is blocked on a mono bug (Lack of correct FileWatcher support -
bug #58234).

> 2)  #1 causes you to have multiple copies of everything, i.e., if I have 
> Song A in my library, add Song B, then re-import, I now have 2 copies of 
> Song A and one copy of Song B.  This is probably an easy fix (or my copy 
> is busticated), and if I knew C# better, I'd probably attach a patch.

There should be checks in place to stop this, can you confirm:
(1) The folder you originally imported
(2) The folder you subsequently imported

Specifically I'm interested to see if (2) was a sub-folder of (1)

Thanks for your feedback
Lee