On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 18:25, Matthew Paul Thomas
<mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx wrote on 04/11/10 10:45:
>...
> The Sound Menu as i understand it was made to enable also other music
> players to place themselves inside of it. Totem is the default player
> for single .mp3 files on every Ubuntu installation i have made so far,
> ironically it never appears in the Sound Menu.
Apparently usability testing of 10.10 found that people were surprised
when music files opened in Totem. I haven't seen the exact results, and
I'm not sure how we'd open standalone music files in Banshee while
making it clear either (a) that they weren't being added to the library,
or (b) how to remove them from the library. (IIRC Mac OS X opens music
files by default in QuickTime Player, not iTunes, presumably for the
same reason.)
In OS X there's now a play button emblem on thumbs for audiofiles.
If you press that play button, which appears on hover iirc, the file starts playing right then and there.
Of course, play and pause are mutually exclusive, so when playing, a pause button replaces the play button emblem.
That would pretty much remove the use case of Totem as "preview" use case, which currently gives it the default player position in Ubuntu at the moment..
We have gstreamer for previewing stuff.. Nautilus already does that, unfortunately already on hover instead of upon select or upon click..
Best would probably be to display Metadata in a sidepane when a music file is selected and a preview function with a seekbar, something like an expanded Sound Menu.
This, together with a good portion of Open with.. would make a lot of people happy i suppose.
> To experience the Sound Menu the way it was intended fully, i'm sure it
> is critical to have the possiblity to control the DE's default audio
> file player first. It doesn't make much sense to have all these pretty
> controls in the Sound Menu only if i'm prepared to take the payload of
> a heavy music database management application like Rhythmbox.
>...
Preferences > Preferred Applications > Multimedia
I meant to control the player via transport controls (play, pause, next, previous, show/hide player) in the Sound Menu, not to control what player should be the default player.
> I think if we use a lean player to test the usability of playback
> controls in the Sound Menu, for example Totem, which is system default
> already, we run a good chance that we soon will notice how best to
> usefully display track metadata.
>...
I don't see how the two things have anything to do with each other.