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Re: I don't get it.
by Benjamin Meyer on Thursday 21/Feb/2002, @15:45
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Well I can wear my wireless headphones and then with my Zaurus just browse over to my computer and change the song. (excellent when working out for example)
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Re: I don't get it.
by Ryan Cumming on Thursday 21/Feb/2002, @16:37
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I'm working on Icecast support right now, which should make Flood much more useful. As Flood is now, unless you have a LAN in your house or something, it just looks pretty. :)
-Ryan
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Re: I don't get it.
by not me on Thursday 21/Feb/2002, @16:50
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>Nothing has mentioned listening to music...only "controlling noatun" which I don't really find as exciting as listening to music.
Heh, you've got a good point. It seems to me like Noatun development is too focused on Noatun-the-extensible-application instead of Noatun-the-program-people-use-to-play-music. IMHO Noatun needs to focus more on being a good, useable, feature-complete player of music than having whiz-bang programmer-centric features like "everything's a plugin!" It seems like a really great music player could have been produced in the time Noatun has been around, but most people still prefer XMMS. The uber-plugin nature of Noatun seems to get in the way sometimes, like in the fact that the playlist can't be skinned, the fact that ID3 tags can't be edited directly from the playlist, and the awkward construction of the configuration dialogs. Noatun should focus more on doing one thing and doing it well than being the super end-all one-stop-shop mega-app.
Seems to me that plugins are more important for closed-source apps like Winamp anyway. If someone wants to extend Noatun, they can darn well download the source and add a feature! This is why I don't understand the fact that playlists and interfaces are (separate kinds of) plugins. I can see I/O and visualization plugins becuase you might want to download/install them separately. Even so, though, no one ever downloads and installs Noatun plugins because they are almost always developed against the CVS version of Noatun instead of the stable one. Most people only use the Noatun plugins that come with KDE, and when they upgrade KDE they get new plugins with the new Noatun, which sort of defeats the purpose of making everything a plugin. Also, it seems to me that if Noatun has a good DCOP interface, this plugin (or also for example the excellent Keys plugin) wouldn't even need to _be_ a plugin.
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Re: I don't get it.
by Carbon on Thursday 21/Feb/2002, @22:03
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Noatun does not play music! Arts plays music! Noatun is a frontend to arts. I don't get why no one understands this. I have quite a few disagreements with Neil myself, but I'm on his side on how much you people just don't seem to absorb the fact that Noatun does not play DVDs or MP3s or anything like that. It just tells aRts to do it, which handles everything that's related to audio (with the possible exception of streaming, but that's another story).
The playlist can be skinned, if someone would bother to develop a skinnable playlist. For instance, you could probably build an xmms playlist, that emulates the functionality of XMMS playlists, and can load XMMS skins. Why you'd want to do this is beyond me, but even using QT based playlists, you can just change the QT theme. And I thought you weren't concerned about anything but playing music anyways.
Uh, no one downloads and installs Noatun plugins because Noatun is OSS and has very few plugins at the moment, so all the good ones come with it anyways (Flood isn't one of the good ones btw, since without Icecast or something along those lines, it doesn't do much).
Yes, if someone wants to extend noatun, they can download it and patch, but what if the feature they want to implement conflicts with one already implemented? It would be impossible to properly, for instance, implement a file system based playlist over a hard coded flat playlist. It just couldn't be done without plugins. The whole point of plugins is they can be interchanged and modularized and make scalabilty easier, not that you can download them if you want to add something later (though this is an added benefit).
*Huff*Puff* :-)
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Re: I don't get it.
by not me on Friday 22/Feb/2002, @11:57
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Noatun is the program people use to play music through aRts. There, is that pedantic enough for you? I don't see how the method Noatun uses to produce sound from the speakers is relevant anyways.
The problem is that the playlist is separate from the rest of the interface, unlike every other music player on the face of the planet. So say you want a Winamp skin loader. It can't have a Winamp style playlist unless you also make and separately activate a Winamp-skinnable playlist. Then if you want the equalizer, you need another equalizer plugin (is this even possible?). I think it's silly. Why not just program the interfaces (and/or playlists) directly into Noatun? That way its easier to program, the components can have more interaction (like ID3 editing more integrated with the playlist), and you can activate/deactivate whole interfaces at once instead of piecemeal. Noatun could still have a modular design, so for example you could replace the playlist engine (though I think that no music player should ever need more than one playlist, but that's a different story). Plugins are not the only way to make a modular design. I just think the current design is TOO modular, making Noatun needlessly complex and non-integrated, for the user and the programmer.
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Re: I don't get it.
by Charles Samuels on Friday 22/Feb/2002, @12:40
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Yes, you're absolutely right! Why have a versatile media player when I could have one that's exactly like every other media player?
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Re: I don't get it.
by not me on Friday 22/Feb/2002, @14:26
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Well, I'm fairly certain I'm not advocating building an inflexible media player, or a media player that's exactly like any other media player. But don't let that stop you from making inane remarks.
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Re: I don't get it.
by Troy on Saturday 13/Dec/2003, @11:16
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Its hardly inane. The fact that the playlist, equalizer, etc,. are plugins allows for the possibility of new and unique ideas in those areas to be implemented relatively painlessly. You wish to lose that functionality for the purpose of skins. While I have no hatred of skinning in and of itself, I don't know why thats so important that this unique quality of noatun should be sacraficed.
-troy
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Re: I don't get it.
by samppa on Sunday 24/Feb/2002, @13:51
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You have good points. I for one would like to use noatun as my mp3 player, as I prefer usung kde/qt apps over others. Noatun just is too complex for everyday use. I use xmms for playing music always. I tried to use noatun for a week, but it just didn't feel right tool for such a simple task. Of course noatun has a lot of potential and I hope that one day it is my player of choice. I agree with your point that developers should concentrate more on usability than making noatun extendible.
Flood is a good idea though, eventhough I don't see much use for it at this moment.
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