MusicPlayers
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Eventually, this page will describe the current experience in Ubuntu when transferring music to and from a portable music player, define the ideal experience, and plan how to get from here to there.
See also [wiki:DesktopTeam/Experiences/PlayingMusic Playing music].
User stories define how this experience should behave, and the expected functionality of the software implementing the experience. A typical experience will have many user stories.
Current experience
Tested with Ubuntu Hardy, alpha 3, by MatthewPaulThomas.
I connected a black first-generation iPod nano that had been used on a Mac, containing a mixture of songs, podcasts, photos, and [http://woz.cs.duke.edu:16080/~sarah/itheoryhome.html some text files].
Nothing happened for seven seconds ([http://launchpad.net/bugs/187054 bug 187054]). Then an icon of a white iPod nano appeared on the desktop, correctly named as I'd named it on the Mac. A couple of seconds later, a "Music Player" window opened in the top left corner of the screen. The iPod was shown (again white) in the "Devices" section of the side pane, but the pane was too small by default ([http://launchpad.net/bugs/145234 bug 145234]), and the iPod was not selected by default ([http://launchpad.net/bugs/187060 bug 187060]).
When I selected the iPod, Music Player listed all the songs and podcasts in a single list. There was a subsection to view just the podcast episodes — though these still were not grouped by podcast ([http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334884 b.g.o 334884]) — but there was no subsection to view just the music tracks ([http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512820 b.g.o 512820]).
The listing had "Track", "Title", "Genre", "Artist", "Album", and "Time" columns. "Track" might be relevant when looking at an individual album, but not when reviewing the contents of a portable music player (). Which columns are shown is a global setting in the Preferences window, rather than being source-specific ([http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512941 b.g.o 512941]). The "Podcasts" subsection had a "Genre" column showing "Podcast" for every item, and an "Album" column when a "Podcast" column would have made more sense ().
The songs on the player were not synchronized to the computer automatically, and there seemed to be no button or menu item for doing this (). On opening the Preferences to see if there were any syncing options, an error alert appeared: "error accessing file:///home/mpt/Podcasts': File not found" ([http://launchpad.net/bugs/62400 bug 62400]).
It was possible to play music and podcast episodes directly from the iPod, but not to hear what I was playing ([http://launchpad.net/bugs/80344 bug 80344]).
If I had connected the iPod while logged in to the same account, ejecting it was easy using the "Eject" button in the toolbar. If I had connected the iPod while logged in to another account, clicking "Eject" made the Eject button disappear, then produced an authentication alert saying "System policy prevents unmounting media mounted by other users" and "An application is attempting to perform an action that requires privileges" (). Clicking "Cancel" in this alert made it appear once more. Clicking "Cancel" a second time produced the Holy Grail of Awful UI: an error alert missing its error message (). The iPod then disappeared from the Music Player window, but was still present on the desktop.
In Nautilus, it was possible to access the text files I had stored on the iPod, as well as the "iPod_Control" folder and the "Desktop DB", and "Desktop DF" files, which probably should be hidden by default (). ("iPod_Control" contains the actual music and podcasts, but this is not useful for browsing, as all the files either have inscrutable names or are not recognized by Ubuntu.) Opening any of the text files produced an alert, because Nautilus thought it was "an executable text file".
Nautilus's Properties window for the iPod correctly described it as an "Apple ... iPod ... Digital Audio Player" in the "Drive" tab, but incorrectly described it as a "folder" in the "Basic" tab (). Nautilus reported how much space the iPod had available, but Music Player did not ([http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317089 b.g.o 317089]).
There was no obvious way to share the contents of the music player — or anything else — with others on the network.
Discussion
- Should be able to use a music player without importing
- Share a connected music player
- Browse Mode needs to be on by default to be consistent
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