unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.
>

I am suggesting to pull the Metadata not from Rhythmbox but from GVFS or
Nautilus.
Totem is leaner and less focused on being a librarian for the files it plays
back. That is why i am hoping for it to be less of a distraction in the
process of designing the Sound Menu. Why is it not yet showing up in there?
Is it perhaps because Totem is called Movie Player? A strange name for the
default .mp3 and .ogg playback utility in Ubuntu..