Oh Dear Lord
This has quite amazing amounts of crack.
It looks like someone thought, "Hey, some people like Muine and some other people like Rhythmbox. Let's glue them together!". Please make it stop.
Update: apparently people think I'm mocking the author. Yeah, maybe a little. However, there are some serious cracky features in there, which I personally don't like, and as this is a personal blog this is where I get to say that sort of thing. Of course there is a hell of a lot of effort in this program (albeit in Python so its easier to get stuff working), but why is this another program?
We already have music players. If I only count the blessed and pratically-blessed players, there is Totem, Rhythmbox and Muine, all with different UI designs. The author of Listen must have at least partially liked one of those (from the screenshots he liked the playlist of Muine but the overall design of Rhythmbox) and then worked on one of those, say adding a pane to Rhythmbox to do what he wanted instead of duplicating large amounts of non-trivial code. It's likely that the result of this would look nothing like Listen, as I still firmly believe that it is ugly.
Of course what he does in his time is his choice and none of my business, so if he wants to write another music player he can, but if someone wants to make a real contribution to the community they should interact with the community in the first place. Otherwise it's just a pet project and if it duplicates existing programs, will likely remain a pet project. Maybe this comes down to centralised source code verses distributed source code (CVS vs Arch), but I doubt it. Downloading a tarball to start patching is easy, and for most people creating an Arch branch isn't exactly trivial.
Update 2: This is a very amusing open letter.
Posted by Gnomer at Wed Feb 8 15:47:05 2006:
Why piss on others work?
Maybe the people that made this player didn't like the other players and thus wanted something better?
Posted by Toastie at Wed Feb 8 15:48:08 2006:
Posted by Lars at Wed Feb 8 15:52:29 2006:
Posted by Holger at Wed Feb 8 16:07:19 2006:
Maybe the people that made this player didn't like the other players and thus wanted something better?
I'd say this reminds me more of amarok than some muinebox :)
I'm not a big fan of amarok, but I know many people that really like listen and they use amarok right now. Those guys hope listen will replace amarok so they can ditch another kde app. And if listen fills this niche I say go for it.
Posted by Elroy at Wed Feb 8 16:11:09 2006:
I'm not a big fan of amarok, but I know many people that really like listen and they use amarok right now. Those guys hope listen will replace amarok so they can ditch another kde app. And if listen fills this niche I say go for it.
Heh, while I prefer Muine myself, (I do the management with Nautilus and tag when I rip thank you.) I'm sure there are people who prefer this.
It's all about choice. More choice is better, as long as there are sensible defaults of course. A sensible choice for me would be playback software for every format legaly possible with a simple interface. Management functionality is too dependant on taste, let the user choose what to use and wether it integrates playback as well.
Of course, this choice is tainted by my peronal preference :-)
Posted by Mike A. Owens at Wed Feb 8 16:14:30 2006:
It's all about choice. More choice is better, as long as there are sensible defaults of course. A sensible choice for me would be playback software for every format legaly possible with a simple interface. Management functionality is too dependant on taste, let the user choose what to use and wether it integrates playback as well.
Of course, this choice is tainted by my peronal preference :-)
For what it's worth, I do know a decent number of otherwise Gnome users using AmaroK because of its over-the-top feature set.
AmaroK is pretty "kitchen-sink", but Listen looks even more complicated, visually at least.
Posted by dave_s at Wed Feb 8 16:41:03 2006:
AmaroK is pretty "kitchen-sink", but Listen looks even more complicated, visually at least.
Speaking as someone whose always identified themselves as one of those interface nazis you hear about, I'm not particularly fazed by this. It seems mostly like a game attempt to make the itunes (and clones) library/playlist dichotomy more discoverable, with a good focus on drag'n'drop playlist creation.
Maybe it's just because the history of music player UI is so bad that anything that isn't trying to pretend to be a stereo (or a car, or a car stereo, or a nekkid lady from baywatch) and just uses the standard system widgets strikes me as daringly restrained.
Posted by jonner at Wed Feb 8 17:15:26 2006:
Maybe it's just because the history of music player UI is so bad that anything that isn't trying to pretend to be a stereo (or a car, or a car stereo, or a nekkid lady from baywatch) and just uses the standard system widgets strikes me as daringly restrained.
Is it really necessary to piss on potential GNOME contributors? Sure, it looks like an overly complex app that I'd never use, but why is it necessary to call it out? Especially when you're syndicated on such a public forum as planet.gnome.org.
Posted by Joe at Wed Feb 8 17:18:23 2006:
This looks like a gnomefied version of Amarok.
I'm a happy rhythmboxer, but perhaps 70% of the new Linux users I come across are very taken with Amarok. It's a reason to switch. This can only be good for GNOME.
Posted by Joe at Wed Feb 8 17:24:22 2006:
I'm a happy rhythmboxer, but perhaps 70% of the new Linux users I come across are very taken with Amarok. It's a reason to switch. This can only be good for GNOME.
Gnome: Because if you aren't in our community, then we get to mock you.
Did you pay any money for this app? Did any of your tax dollars go to support it? Did it draw preciously needed funds away from research into a disease?
If you don't like it, then return it for you money back. Oh, it's free? Then STFU.
Honestly, this is probably some kid and his friends trying their hands at GNOME development, and you mock them. Unbelievable.
Posted by Bryan at Wed Feb 8 17:40:07 2006:
Did you pay any money for this app? Did any of your tax dollars go to support it? Did it draw preciously needed funds away from research into a disease?
If you don't like it, then return it for you money back. Oh, it's free? Then STFU.
Honestly, this is probably some kid and his friends trying their hands at GNOME development, and you mock them. Unbelievable.
It's amazing how many people feel you can't express your opinions on software that sucks. Sure you could have been constructive, but that's your right not to be. These comments are insane and the software looks bad.
Posted by Itai at Wed Feb 8 17:48:15 2006:
Wow, this software just rocks! it is so nice!
Ten times better the rythembox. And u don't need to use mono for it - its just python. I just downloaded it now and I am so happy. Thanks man, you've made my week. Finally I can ditch rythmbox altogether.
Posted by Chris I at Wed Feb 8 17:48:50 2006:
Posted by Peter at Wed Feb 8 17:49:32 2006:
Ten times better the rythembox. And u don't need to use mono for it - its just python. I just downloaded it now and I am so happy. Thanks man, you've made my week. Finally I can ditch rythmbox altogether.
I'm with Bryan on this one: It's one man's opinion, not an edict from on high: "STOP MAKING THIS PLAYER, ALL OF GNOME HATES YOU". If folks personally like the player, they'll contribute to it, end of story.
If they let one 'oh god this is bad' post detract them from doing that, then they need to work on the realities of OSS, one of which is "there will be people that say what you are working on sucks, is a waste of time, and could be better spent on project X".
I, for one, see the first screenshots of the UI and have a reaction similar to Ross', but it doesn't matter, cause that's a personal preference, nothing more.
Posted by Martin at Wed Feb 8 18:04:52 2006:
If they let one 'oh god this is bad' post detract them from doing that, then they need to work on the realities of OSS, one of which is "there will be people that say what you are working on sucks, is a waste of time, and could be better spent on project X".
I, for one, see the first screenshots of the UI and have a reaction similar to Ross', but it doesn't matter, cause that's a personal preference, nothing more.
Mike: it's not as people prefer amaroK because it's got so many pretty features. It's rather that amaroKs SVN snapshots are more stable than all Banshee releases together, it doesn't take half an hour to start and after 30mins of playing paves your system with load above 1 like Rhythmbox, and the important features work.
People use amaroK because the state of Gnome music players is really horrible. That's ofcourse because everyone and their cat create their own player, and development on the official one (Rhythmbox) doesn't seem to happen at all.
Posted by Ross at Wed Feb 8 18:09:07 2006:
People use amaroK because the state of Gnome music players is really horrible. That's ofcourse because everyone and their cat create their own player, and development on the official one (Rhythmbox) doesn't seem to happen at all.
Martin: Rhythmbox isn't an official GNOME music player, it's just been around for a long time. The only program capable of music playback "officially" in GNOME is Totem.
Posted by Eric at Wed Feb 8 18:13:12 2006:
I recently interned at Novell and had a chance to work a bit on the Banshee interface with Aaron. One of things we talked about was how Apple managed to find success with the iTunes/iPod combo, specifically this boiled down to creating a good player in the iPod and a good organizer in iTunes.
This Listen app is a great effort IMHO to do the same thing using only software. Rhythmbox is slow and a pain to use to play just one song. Muine is great but lacks more advanced organizational features. After trying Listen, it was very responsive and reminded me of when I used xmms/beep/winamp when playing one file. The great thing was I still got the organizational features of both Rhythmbox and Muine as well. I have found the lyrics and wikipedia aspect to be extremely interesting as well. It has some rough edges of course, but overall I think it is addressing the problems with other popular players.
Your update regarding reproducing a lot of code seems to make it clear the power of using Python instead of C. It seems worthwhile to reproduce quickly features in a language like Python instead of bogging yourself down with C for no real reason to do so. You also get the potential benefit of it immediately becoming more cross platform.
My main point here is that just because you don't like the interface (which is a valid criticism), it doesn't mean that the app doesn't solve problems that are currently not solved by the available music players.
Posted by Joe Buck at Wed Feb 8 18:26:37 2006:
This Listen app is a great effort IMHO to do the same thing using only software. Rhythmbox is slow and a pain to use to play just one song. Muine is great but lacks more advanced organizational features. After trying Listen, it was very responsive and reminded me of when I used xmms/beep/winamp when playing one file. The great thing was I still got the organizational features of both Rhythmbox and Muine as well. I have found the lyrics and wikipedia aspect to be extremely interesting as well. It has some rough edges of course, but overall I think it is addressing the problems with other popular players.
Your update regarding reproducing a lot of code seems to make it clear the power of using Python instead of C. It seems worthwhile to reproduce quickly features in a language like Python instead of bogging yourself down with C for no real reason to do so. You also get the potential benefit of it immediately becoming more cross platform.
My main point here is that just because you don't like the interface (which is a valid criticism), it doesn't mean that the app doesn't solve problems that are currently not solved by the available music players.
I urge the Gnome developers to remove the word "crack" from their vocabulary. It is a content-free insult and doesn't serve anyone; it just makes the speaker look like an arrogant prick.
As others have said, this project looks like it was put together by a relatively inexperienced person. Yes, it has a cluttered look because it's trying to do too much at once. How is it helping that person to either improve the tool, or do a better job next time, to call his volunteer project "crack"?
Yeah, yeah, it's your personal blog. But it appears on several Planets, and the effect is to make this guy feel officially dissed.
Thanks for helping to grow the developer community. Not.
Posted by Rafael Rezende at Wed Feb 8 18:47:32 2006:
As others have said, this project looks like it was put together by a relatively inexperienced person. Yes, it has a cluttered look because it's trying to do too much at once. How is it helping that person to either improve the tool, or do a better job next time, to call his volunteer project "crack"?
Yeah, yeah, it's your personal blog. But it appears on several Planets, and the effect is to make this guy feel officially dissed.
Thanks for helping to grow the developer community. Not.
If Totem is the only official GNOME music player, it's proof that we really need more players, because both Banshee and Muine (my favorite) run on top of Mono and there will always be people saying they suck because of that.
Rhythmbox has really just basic functionality without a very good gui and takes a lot to index all my files, Muine is so much faster to index and doesn't suck up all my machine's resources while doing it.
As for Listen, it may not have the best gui, but I like the lyrics/wikipedia integration, it already indexes faster then rhythmbox and seems to be just one guy's effort to make a music player he likes. I just hope he doesn't loose interest because of this kind of comments and maybe use them to improve his player.
Posted by Alex at Wed Feb 8 19:51:58 2006:
Posted by Sean Connery at Wed Feb 8 20:39:19 2006:
Rhythmbox has really just basic functionality without a very good gui and takes a lot to index all my files, Muine is so much faster to index and doesn't suck up all my machine's resources while doing it.
As for Listen, it may not have the best gui, but I like the lyrics/wikipedia integration, it already indexes faster then rhythmbox and seems to be just one guy's effort to make a music player he likes. I just hope he doesn't loose interest because of this kind of comments and maybe use them to improve his player.
I'll take aal bum cover for 7000, Trebek.
Still looks like a nice app with potential. With some more thought the ui could be great. I think criticizing it like this is cheap.
Posted by z at Wed Feb 8 21:16:34 2006:
Posted by kal0 at Wed Feb 8 21:38:37 2006:
Still looks like a nice app with potential. With some more thought the ui could be great. I think criticizing it like this is cheap.
This is great .. gnome music players really sucks...I'm always using amarok, this app looks (in terms of features) exactly like amarok just in a gnomish way... this are the early releases so some patience for them to put a nicer interface or if you want to contribute do it also instead of just slamming their ideas... things like that always happen and I doubt this will be a pet project just because you don't approve it. Kudos to the Listen guys good move... I will check it out ..
Posted by Joe Wreschnig at Wed Feb 8 21:40:33 2006:
This project ripped off a shitload of my code. I don't care what we does in his free time, but the fast indexing, the lyrics downloading, all sorts of things, are NOT HIS WORK. They represent a year of effort by me and other people involved with Quod Libet.
Posted by Robert Soros at Wed Feb 8 21:40:35 2006:
This looks really nice IMHO and it looks like a few others here are excited about it as well. It doesn't surprise me though. The direction gnome has been taking for the last few years, in trying to dumb down every interface and remove functionality, is getting a bit old. That's just my opinion.. but it's nice to see someone break away from that mold and inject a little life into gnome's wasteland of interface stupidity.
Posted by Alexandre at Wed Feb 8 21:42:59 2006:
Posted by Robert Soros at Wed Feb 8 21:44:39 2006:
Joe, you're sounding a bit resentful, why? The sources to Listen are provided on his website (including binary packages as well.)
Posted by Itai at Wed Feb 8 21:47:01 2006:
To the guy who wrote this software:
Don't listen to these cry-babies here. You've done a great piece of software. The GUI is very nice. The program is awsome. Much better than all of the other Gnome alternatives so far.
Its a delight for a music lover - especially the lyrics thing. I am using it right now.
Keep on working on it!
Itai.
Posted by Tom at Wed Feb 8 22:20:30 2006:
Don't listen to these cry-babies here. You've done a great piece of software. The GUI is very nice. The program is awsome. Much better than all of the other Gnome alternatives so far.
Its a delight for a music lover - especially the lyrics thing. I am using it right now.
Keep on working on it!
Itai.
This is pretty interesting to look at. I was very surprised to see this app spring full-form to life -- I know see from the letter how it did so. So the guy looks like a neophyte, but here's the interesting thing: his software basically works. Not only that, but I reported one bug and it was fixed without 8 hours. The thing looks & feels better to me then rhythmbox or muine or banshee -- using all of those apps I've run into bugs that were never fixed.
My point is not that Listen rocks or that any of the other GNOME audio players suck. The point is simply that this guy has loads of energy and made something cool. Yes, he made it bric-a-brac, but isn't that just the kind of remixing that makes free culture so great -- why is it so bad to have that enter into software as well?
Posted by Joe Wreschnig at Wed Feb 8 22:22:37 2006:
My point is not that Listen rocks or that any of the other GNOME audio players suck. The point is simply that this guy has loads of energy and made something cool. Yes, he made it bric-a-brac, but isn't that just the kind of remixing that makes free culture so great -- why is it so bad to have that enter into software as well?
Robert, I'm pissed because he stripped my copyright notices, relicensed it, and didn't credit any of us. That's called copyright infringement, and it means he doesn't have permission to distribute my software.
Posted by Travis Shirk at Thu Feb 9 06:41:08 2006:
Hah! Hey Ross, guess what. I'm hacking on my own
audio player too, and I'm having a blast doing it.
Sincerely,
:-p
Posted by deech at Thu Feb 9 08:36:56 2006:
audio player too, and I'm having a blast doing it.
Sincerely,
:-p
hmm looks like the author is doing the right thing. Site is temporarily down...
and i quote:
"he time to do what is necessary
and giving the appropriate credits to the people concerned,
like the creators of Quodlibet/Mutagen who without those listen would be nothing
All my excuses to Joe Wreschnig"
Posted by artb at Thu Feb 9 09:56:54 2006:
and i quote:
"he time to do what is necessary
and giving the appropriate credits to the people concerned,
like the creators of Quodlibet/Mutagen who without those listen would be nothing
All my excuses to Joe Wreschnig"
Sound Juicer has a cracky profiles managament,
mayby it wold be better to work on that, than
dissing others' work?
Posted by Ross at Thu Feb 9 10:03:23 2006:
mayby it wold be better to work on that, than
dissing others' work?
artb: Yes, I know its terrible. It's not part of Sound Juicer but a library in gnome-media, but I do plan on doing something about it when 2.14 is out.
The main reason I dislike it is that I can't make SJ automatically install a MP3 pipeline.
Posted by Alexandre at Thu Feb 9 10:32:19 2006:
The main reason I dislike it is that I can't make SJ automatically install a MP3 pipeline.
Ross, are you planning to add the "Year:" field to SJ? It's kinda strange not to be able to edit this tag from the very beginning ;)
Posted by Ross at Thu Feb 9 10:39:47 2006:
Alexandre: I prefer to get people to add the metadata they want to the source, rather than hack around the problem in SJ. With SJ 2.13 you can press a button and edit the metadata in Musicbrainz.
My basic objection to adding more metadata fields in the interface is the clutter they add. You and others want a year field, some want a disc number field, others want a Composer field. Per-track genre would be useful, but then you'd really want per-track year and Composer, and everything else. Straight away SJ is no longer an easy to you tool, but a UI nightmare with a million entry fields.
Maybe an "Advanced" button somewhere would help this, by letting people add per-track data as required, but I'm not sure.
Posted by smoke at Thu Feb 9 11:46:27 2006:
Posted by ryan at Thu Feb 9 12:19:19 2006:
My basic objection to adding more metadata fields in the interface is the clutter they add. You and others want a year field, some want a disc number field, others want a Composer field. Per-track genre would be useful, but then you'd really want per-track year and Composer, and everything else. Straight away SJ is no longer an easy to you tool, but a UI nightmare with a million entry fields.
Maybe an "Advanced" button somewhere would help this, by letting people add per-track data as required, but I'm not sure.
Bryan: of course Ross has the right to say whatever he pleases on his own personal blog. But we also have the right to think hes a jerk for saying it the way he said it. Like it or not, when you say things in public people react to them. The only way to stop us from letting Ross+readers know what we think is to turn off comments and quit posting... all that stuff is so obvious why did you even bring it up?
To me the author may have made some mistakes, but he seems willing to fix them, and being so derisive about it just makes you look like an elitist jerk.
We all know we are as good as Ross and yourself, but there is no need to rub our faces in it.
Posted by Alan Horkan at Thu Feb 9 17:56:33 2006:
To me the author may have made some mistakes, but he seems willing to fix them, and being so derisive about it just makes you look like an elitist jerk.
We all know we are as good as Ross and yourself, but there is no need to rub our faces in it.
Wow, Ross has created a firestorm and loads of publicity for Listen. Hopefully we can turn that around into a positive thing and give the author good advice on how to explore his new ideas and also follow the Gnome guidelines.
I think it is brave of Ross to continue allow comments and create a real dialogue with the community and hear the feedback which not enough many others make the effort to do.
Posted by 2097 at Thu Mar 30 10:28:18 2006:
I think it is brave of Ross to continue allow comments and create a real dialogue with the community and hear the feedback which not enough many others make the effort to do.
No, Ross is right; cracky software needs to be called out and taken behind the chemical sheds.
Now, if we could turn our attention to the well-beloved, crack-heavy programs already popular in the gnome community; Rhythmbox, I'm casting menacing glances in your general direction.
Posted by Sunnan at Thu Mar 30 13:28:04 2006:
Now, if we could turn our attention to the well-beloved, crack-heavy programs already popular in the gnome community; Rhythmbox, I'm casting menacing glances in your general direction.
And crack is not "content-free"; it means error or "smell" (as the word smell is used on the c2 wiki), especially when it comes to usability.
Posted by Riddian at Thu Jan 18 16:18:04 2007:
I personally would like to thank the author of this blog post. He is entitled to his opinion and to be quite honest I'm glad he made it otherwise I would not have found this great player :D
I'm a big fan of Muine but my laptop is not the fastest of beats and Muine hogs 30% of the CPU. 30% just to play OGG's is unacceptable in my eyes. Luckily "Listen" does all that Muine does and more without eating into my CPU. Personally I don't think the design is THAT bad, the center column is certainly something I think could be better implemented, the option to open the library and so on in a separate window similar to Muine would be nice too.
Thanks again for the post :P
I'm a big fan of Muine but my laptop is not the fastest of beats and Muine hogs 30% of the CPU. 30% just to play OGG's is unacceptable in my eyes. Luckily "Listen" does all that Muine does and more without eating into my CPU. Personally I don't think the design is THAT bad, the center column is certainly something I think could be better implemented, the option to open the library and so on in a separate window similar to Muine would be nice too.
Thanks again for the post :P
