The desktop beyond F10

[Dan Winship]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-11-07 at 10:05 -0500, Bill Peck wrote:
>>>> Default CD ripper      Make Rhythmbox as good as iTunes for CD import
>>> My last CD-ripping experience went like this: Insert CD 1. Rip CD 1.
>>> Insert CD 2. Rip CD 2. Insert CD 3. Rip CD 3. ... Rip CD 6. Plug in MP3
>>> player. Open the Music folder in Nautilus. Select the files to
>>> copy---GOD DAMN YOU RHYTHMBOX! WHY THE $@!^#@$%^#$% DID YOU OUTPUT .OGGs
>>> WITHOUT TELLING ME!?!... Insert CD 1. Re-rip CD 1...
>>>
>> So what should the default be?  I personally rip everything as flac.
> 
> The default should be what we can legally ship with, which isn't
> mp3.  .ogg is not a bad choice.

The overriding goal is to help the user do the stuff they want to do. If
we can't do that for legal reasons, then "helping the user do stuff they
DON'T want to do" is not a reasonable fallback. (I realize that
.ogg-by-default *is* an ok choice for many people, so we're not
completely losing here.)

But am I wrong in believing that MP3 is the de facto standard compressed
audio format? And that many people have devices that play MP3s but not
oggs? And that when people say "rip", it's generally assumed they mean
"rip to mp3" unless they explicitly name another file format?

If so, then Rhythmbox (or actually, Sound Juicer, right?) has bad
confusing UI, because it doesn't support MP3, but it never acknowledges
this fact anywhere, leaving the user to assume that it does. (Even I get
confused, and I *know* Fedora can't ship MP3 support.)

If our use cases for the "Default CD ripper" feature assume that some
people are going to want to rip to MP3 (which I assume they will), and
our CD ripping tool is not going to support MP3 (which I assume it
won't), then the UI ought to be a lot more explicit about this, and make
sure that the user isn't going to waste their time ripping CDs into a
format they can't use.

-- Dan