Comments on: Day 2 – 10 Days of Ubuntu 10.10 Feature Requests

By: prayag

prayag — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:06:10 +0000

i like exaile. Anyone know how to configure it behind a proxy..?

By: Andre

Andre — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:12:35 +0000

What will always be a problem with the “out of the box Ubuntu music experience” is exactly that Ubuntu can’t play mp3s and other proprietary formats without some random package.

For a newbie, this is difficult to solve, and he will simply turn away from Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu *really* has to allow packages that aren’t purely open. Consider Arch Linux.

By: Micah

Micah — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:53:46 +0000

Another good post, Tanner! I agree with you re: songbird vs. Rhythmbox. Pretty much the only thing the latter does better is support for podcasts — something Songbird has foolishly decided not to focus on for the time being, even though they had previously promised it in an upcoming release. The Songbird devs have also made some questionable decisions with the UI in the 1.4 release (Good God is it ugly!). That said, though, Sognbird’s my player of choice. On Windows and Linux.

By: Trond Husø

Trond Husø — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:07:48 +0000

I moved from RB to Banshee when I found out that RB didn’t connect covers in my iPod.
Then it also messed up some metadata.
I am not sure if I reported it as a bug.
I am not that satisfied with Banshee as I find the GUI rather cluttered. And you can’t remove, replace stuff.
I did like the layout of Rythmbox, and I might return to it.
I agree with the author that Songbird looks promising. It is one project that I return to from time to time. I do how ever feel that the project is not progressing fast enough.

One thing I would like though, is for Open Source software to become something you pay for. Most of us like the idea of free and open, but even those of us who program, find it hard to get into a project as big as RB, Banshee, Songbird etc.

I’ve written this many times on other forums as well, I don’t mind paying for software. I believe that having “making money” as one motivation to create software is a good motivation. Another one is of course that people uses your software.
Having a company that is thinking commercial behind the software is also not a bad thing. Then we know that we will be getting the most important – what people want – features first, then _maybe_ nice to have features later. Now I feel that those nice to have features comes first.

I must applaud those who do this type of work for free without any thoughts regarding making money, but I do believe that having a solid company structure behind it is the right way to go.
I’ve seen a few OpenSource/Free promising projects stall because of lack of motivation. When you know that there are $$ on the way to your bank account, I believe that projects will last longer.

Just my $0.5

By: Mikko

Mikko — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:33:11 +0000

i do not want a linux clone of windows media bloatware player (same for itunes)

i do not want mono reinstalled in my pcs so i will never use banshee

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:47:30 +0000

Songbird is such a bloated mess, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use it.

By: Modnar

Modnar — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:56:43 +0000

I use Songbird and Exaile. I think Exaile should be the default.

I also do not want Banshee as the default as it depends on Mono. I think we should carefully watch how many eggs we place in the Mono basket.

By: molecule-eye

molecule-eye — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:17:40 +0000

No doubt Rhythmbox is not ideal, but it’s not bad either. The problem is that most people have modern-ish iPods and Rhythmbox’s current plugin for that is lousy. The Banshee one is quite actually, even if it may require that you recopy all your music in the library over. (This isn’t necessary but it may make things run smoother for syncing–at least this has been my experience.)

I would definitely NOT recommend Songbird as default. Yes, it has some useful features like adding/deleting cover art as metadata, but it’s bloated and has no GTK integration. (The very useful notification icons of Banshee and Rhythmbox are, well, very useful!)

By: James Livingston

James Livingston — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:08:56 +0000

I think that whichever one is chosen, it would be good if they put some effort behind that decision.

* pick Rhythmbox, and do some work fixing the things people complain about.
* pick Banshee/Songbird, and then work on adding the missing features that RB had.
* decide they’re all no good, and start a new one.

Given how much people argue and complain about music players, the various Linux companies put very little effort into developing them. I know Novell hired abock (Banshee maintainer) but I don’t think he’s been doing a lot of Banshee work of late, and bnocera (Totem maintainer) is employed by RH but he does a lot of other things too.

By: Travis Watkins

Travis Watkins — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:29:53 +0000

Ubuntu can’t use Qt/KDE apps due to size constraints, for one thing.
Even if that was not the case these apps use completely different infrastructure and look and work very differently. Although much work has been done to integrate the two and sometimes you can’t even tell the difference from a screenshot it becomes obvious when you start actually using the app.