Ubuntu's Music App Undergoes Further Planning

[zanny]

I like how absurdly NIH this comes off as. Clementine is the best music player I've ever used, and it is pure qt based like Canonical wants, but hey, they don't have a CLA on it.

The only excuse is "we don't like the interface" but anything they make will have none of the features Clementine does.

On the phone, though, a music player is probably one of the most trivial apps ever with qt multimedia. That shouldn't be hard to make unless they try to get web services integrations.

[russofris]

Hooray, another music player. Just yesterday, I was thinking, "You know what this community needs? ANOTHER MUSIC PLAYER!!!"

Hopefully, they'll implement a new type of robust and extensible metadata-tagging and come up with a new container format as well with an all new type of DRM so that they can rip off gullible rich teenagers in new and exciting ways.

[kaprikawn]

Hooray, another music player. Just yesterday, I was thinking, "You know what this community needs? ANOTHER MUSIC PLAYER!!!"

Hopefully, they'll implement a new type of robust and extensible metadata-tagging and come up with a new container format as well with an all new type of DRM so that they can rip off gullible rich teenagers in new and exciting ways.

I agree that we don't need another music player if it's just going to be like the rest, but I'm yet to find a decent player on Linux that competes with Media Monkey on Windows. Something that good we certainly could do with.

[TheSoulz]

Hooray, another music player. Just yesterday, I was thinking, "You know what this community needs? ANOTHER MUSIC PLAYER!!!"

Hopefully, they'll implement a new type of robust and extensible metadata-tagging and come up with a new container format as well with an all new type of DRM so that they can rip off gullible rich teenagers in new and exciting ways.

thats actualy true... sadly...
i tyred like 5 or 6 music players and they were all crap. (my opinion)
i decided to use VLC for music, thats how bad it is xD

[russofris]

I agree that we don't need another music player if it's just going to be like the rest

/emote Makes Nostradamus face

I'm sure this one will start up and ask you to point to your library. It will then do nothing for 15 mins while it spins your disk scanning the library. It will then find 99% of the songs your last music player did, because in 2005, you thought Musepack was a good idea for a month. It will lock up for 5 minutes while it tries to render the "ALL" playlist on your gigantic music collection. You'll sort by artist and start a song, which will start skipping when you go to fetch all the missing album art for the first time. It's not going to find artwork for 30% of your collection, despite each album having it's own directory containing a file called "front.jpg", cause why would anyone do something like that?

Your music will sound exactly the same as it did when you played it in 2000 with XMMS and/or Winamp, except for now, the "Music Player" will bombard you with advertising for shit you don't need while trying to make it so that you pay for the songs you already own. For an extra $.99, you can "enable" a crappy visualization that looks just like Milkshape did back when you actually cared about the bands you listened to.

[jacob]

I agree, we don't need another player, esp. since Gnome Music is being developed with a touch-oriented UI too. I'm using rhythmbox and am mostly happy with it. I would just like it to have a built-in conversion capability (FLAC -> lossy).

[kaprikawn]

/emote Makes Nostradamus face

I'm sure this one will start up and ask you to point to your library. It will then do nothing for 15 mins while it spins your disk scanning the library. It will then find 99% of the songs your last music player did, because in 2005, you thought Musepack was a good idea for a month. It will lock up for 5 minutes while it tries to render the "ALL" playlist on your gigantic music collection. You'll sort by artist and start a song, which will start skipping when you go to fetch all the missing album art for the first time. It's not going to find artwork for 30% of your collection, despite each album having it's own directory containing a file called "front.jpg", cause why would anyone do something like that?

Your music will sound exactly the same as it did when you played it in 2000 with XMMS and/or Winamp, except for now, the "Music Player" will bombard you with advertising for shit you don't need while trying to make it so that you pay for the songs you already own. For an extra $.99, you can "enable" a crappy visualization that looks just like Milkshape did back when you actually cared about the bands you listened to.

Couldn't have put it better myself. When I refresh my library on Media Monkey, it does the search in a background thread which I can see the progress of, but it neither locks up Media Monkey, nor the rest of my machine. If I'm on my 'All' playlist, files just appear as they're found. Same with the 'Analyse volume' functionality which I use, the player is fully functional while it's in operation. Tagging media can be done using multiple methods (from the web/Amazon, from the filename/path and other ways). The UI is fully customisable, there is literally nothing that I could think of to improve Media Monkey short of making it open source.

[zanny]

I agree, we don't need another player, esp. since Gnome Music is being developed with a touch-oriented UI too. I'm using rhythmbox and am mostly happy with it. I would just like it to have a built-in conversion capability (FLAC -> lossy).

Gnome Music is GTK based and Canonical only wants qt based software on their phones. And honestly, that is the one place where they are pretty justified, because you want to really minimize the footprint of the OS when you only have 4 - 32gb of flash storage available and GTK would consume a few hundred megs.

[curaga]

Gnome Music is GTK based and Canonical only wants qt based software on their phones. And honestly, that is the one place where they are pretty justified, because you want to really minimize the footprint of the OS when you only have 4 - 32gb of flash storage available and GTK would consume a few hundred megs.

Either gtk3 has really bloated it up, or you have sizes mixed:

105M /opt/qt-4.8.3/
7M glib2 + gdk2 + gtk2

[zanny]

Either gtk3 has really bloated it up, or you have sizes mixed:

105M /opt/qt-4.8.3/
7M glib2 + gdk2 + gtk2

Name : gtk3
Version : 3.10.7-1
Depends On : atk cairo gtk-update-icon-cache libcups libxcursor libxinerama libxrandr
libxi libxcomposite libxdamage pango shared-mime-info colord at-spi2-atk
wayland libxkbcommon
Optional Deps : gnome-themes-standard: Default widget theme
gnome-icon-theme: Default icon theme [installed]
Required By : gtk-engine-unico gtkmm3 light-themes networkmanager-openvpn oxygen-gtk3
pcsxr system-config-printer usbview wireshark-gtk zenity
Optional For : avahi dconf ghostscript kde-gtk-config librsvg
Installed Size : 60609.00 KiB

Among those, the icon theme is 10M more (and several applications depend on it, such as pavucontrol, and for some reason the ubuntu-mono font family package). The various libraries it pulls in aren't all used by KDE, so they add up to several megs more.

But my gtk2 package is also 56M, and has most of the same dependencies. So GTK3 doesn't seem bloated - here is the complete install list for gtk2:

https://gist.github.com/Korvox/c2e8a35110003bbeb887

Most of it is documentation images. But the qt4 package I have is also 85M, and that is mostly documentation too.

Even if you prune the docs, you have to contend with loading all these libraries in for just one application, and you get cache thrashing when you have concurrent apps with hot paths in two different toolkits running concurrently (just as the internal render or polling loops) you can avoid if most of your software is on one toolkit.