CD burning with Nautilus, was: Why xcdroast and not gcombust?

[Alexander Larsson]

On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 23:04, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> Sorry for stepping up so late (I've been on vacation).
> 
> On Mon, 2003-09-01 at 17:28, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > One comment about the current music cd burning abilities. This is very
> > limiting and will in the future be removed in favour of a "burn
> > playlist" button in the media player (rhythmbox for instance).
> 
> Excuse me, but this is more than counterintuitive -- I asked my wife
> where she would look for something to burn her music on CD and it was
> definitely not the music player -- and she is an end user (beat this
> ;-). Funny enough, she would expect a CD-burning application which kinda
> makes sense since the task probably gets perceived rather as "burn a CD"
> (with whatever contents) than as "do XYZ with my music" or "do XYZ with
> my data" -- putting a medium in the drive could be more "tangible" than
> shuffling bits around, but I'm getting philosophic...

A cd burning application would be a pretty bad ui for burning an audio
CD, since in them you can't easily listen to the tracks, find the music
from your library, view id3 information, see how many minutes the
current list of music is, etc. Unless of course this was a specific
audio-burning-app. But then, if it were, it would be pretty close to a
music player. The macos X music player iTunes has a burn button. End
users seem to have no problem understanding it.

> > There just isn't any sane way to handle ordering of the songs in the
> > nautilus UI. Plus you want to know things like total play time and have
> > easy preview of the songs.
> 
> Hypothetically asked (meaning I don't want you to commit to anything):
> Would it be that hard to implement a new Nautilus view which were aware
> of ordering and other stuff needed for that? Of course (Havoc will hate
> that) it would need to expose some of the innards of audio CDs and
> CD-ROMs, red, orange and other coloured books to the user, but I guess
> this could be done easy for easy tasks (copying whole audio+data CDs,
> burning ISOs, burning just data) and still provide means to do more
> sophisticated stuff...

It is hard to get the ordering data from a audio-specific burn: view,
and the view would be both hard to find, and quite a lot of work to
write.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
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