replacing XMMS

[Matt Hansen]

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 03:48, Colin Walters wrote: 
> So our situation with music players is a little bad.  Right now in the
> menu we have "Music Player" and "Audio Player".  The first is Rhythmbox,
> the second is XMMS.  A user new to Fedora is going to be baffled by this
> - it's like having two clocks.
> 
> Ideally we would only have one music player.  I'm hoping to get
> Rhythmbox in good enough shape for FC3 that it can replace XMMS for most
> use cases.
> 
> What I'm curious of is comments by people who still use XMMS, and why. 
> What are the most important things to you that need to be fixed in
> Rhythmbox?

Hi Colin,

Well here's my opinion. Apart from it using less CPU resources, I can
find nothing else I personally like about it. For a start, it is _way_
to small. I need to basically squint real close to see things. (And yes,
my eyesight is fine. ;) I also know there's the Ctrl-D combo to make it
larger, but on my screen, this looks real ugly. Second, there UI is
horrible. How can anyone like the controls and navigations in this?
Having to click a non-obvious drop-down button to get to the menu items
is far from desired for a new user. And like many audio players, it's
inundated with preferences and settings that most users have no need
for. 

Rythmbox is growing on me more and more these days. I use it for all my
mp3'ing/ogg'ing etc. It is a shame to have to retrieve gnome-plugins to
make it mp3able but hey, do it once and that's it. And it's for a better
cause with Fedora's goals which I agree and admire. :) 
Someone commented on it taking too much space. Well I disagree. There's
a great taskbar feature used with Rythmbox and other software that
places an icon there whereby you can click the taskbar icon to open or
hide the player completely! I love this feature and wish more apps would
do this. Also saves panel space.
Another thing I like is the ability to right-click an audio file and
"add to music album" or somesuch. 
A couple things I'm not so fussed on (maybe due to lack of knowledge) is
that is not able to play _one_ song without it jumping to the next, i.e.
it's always in playlist mode (which is great, but sometimes I only want
to play one song). Any way to change that? Also, there's a lack of
control buttons it seems. There's currently "go to next song" go to
previous" and "play/pause". What about stop?
Overall, I'm happy with it, and it's much more UI friendly which I feel
is better. So, I'm one for not caring if xmms is not installed by
default or is replaced. Heh, apologies for the length..

Regards,
-Matt 

-- 
"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"
 - Bob Young on the benefits of the open source development model.
mhelios - www.fedoraforum.org 
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