Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Suggestions

[Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Garrett Gaston <garrett85 hotmail com> wrote:
> One is that there doesn't seem to be a
> music store plug in.

There are various music store plugins floating around here and there.
The ones most widely available are for liberally licensed media such
as from Magnatune and Jamendo; since Rhythmbox is a member of the
GNOME platform, the upstream distribution *should* eschew the same
ideals of freedom as the rest of the GNOME platform.

Ubuntu has (or had?) an Ubuntu One music store plugin for Rhythmbox.
It has apparently come and gone over the years as they've switched
away from Rhythmbox and then back to it as the default music player.
Anyway, if you use the right version of Ubuntu, you can buy music from
Ubuntu One directly within Rhythmbox, and download it. This plugin is
not upstream.

I'm also working on refreshing a Spotify plugin for Rhythmbox which
allowed streaming (but not downloading) from the Spotify catalog for
Spotify Premium users. The plugin was written for an older version of
Rhythmbox and libspotify, so upgrading it is taking some work. I have
it to the point where it *technically* works, but it's got some bugs
to resolve still.

I could swear there was a Rhythmbox plugin for Amazon MP3 at some
point, but I don't know where it's gone or if it ever existed. Could
just be my foggy memory. Anyway I don't think it was ever upstream, as
is true of many (most?) Rhythmbox plugins.

If you're using a vanilla upstream Rhythmbox, this could explain why
you are noticing a lack of store plugins.

> I also recently noticed that when I did a drag and
> drop, file.mp3 over the Rhythmbox screen and then release, it would add the
> file to the library but to my horror wouldn't copy the file to the right
> location, /home/garrett/music/artists/album/file.mp3 based on the artsit and
> album, it would just leave it at it's current location.

If this is something you want implemented, then we need a way to
distinguish between what the user intent really is when they drag and
drop. Some people would consider it equally "to their horror" if you
drag and drop and it *did* copy the media; certain other media players
do copy your media whenever you add it to the library, and people find
this extremely aggravating if they only want to store one copy in one
place rather than duplicating the data and consuming twice as much
disk space.

Since the drag and drop idiom itself doesn't provide any ability for
the user to say what they want to be *done* with the objects being
dragged and dropped, we would have to either eliminate drag and drop
altogether, or pop up a dialog asking what to do. Both of these
alternatives seem to have drawbacks, and I'm not sure how the
Rhythmbox maintainer or downstream users of Rhythmbox would react to
such a change.

> Now, then to my
> plesant suprise I could manually move the file in Nautilus and somehow
> Rhythmbox was aware of this move. That's nice but I would still like it to
> copy and move the file into or create a folder for it's artist, then move
> into or create a folder for the album.

Rhythmbox has always (as long as I can remember, anyway) been aware of
filesystem changes within the media library director(y,ies). The best
way to get media into the media library, in my view, is simply to copy
it using a file manager or external sync program into your media
library (symlinks work too, IIRC). If you have multiple distinct
devices that are sometimes plugged in and sometimes not, you can add
multiple media directories. If a media directory is completely
missing, its database of music won't be instantly deleted -- it will
be saved, and when that media directory becomes available again, all
of the media will be very quickly recognized in the library again.
Just to reiterate, none of this functionality performs any file
copying; it's only gathering metadata from the files and storing the
metadata in a rather small database called rhythmdb.

Adding file copying functionality into Rhythmbox itself that can be
perfectly performed by other utilities such as Deja Dup or Nautilus
seems redundant, IMHO. But it would be an option to modify one of (or
all of) the media player plugins for iPod, etc. to optionally perform
a two-way sync: from the device to the computer, and from the computer
to the device. I don't know a whole lot about the functionality of
these plugins but it sounds like the functionality you want would best
be implemented in a plugin rather than as part of core Rhythmbox.

Sean

Disclaimer: I am not a Rhythmbox maintainer, only a (third-party,
external) plugin hacker.

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