What exactly is the usage model of banshee?

[tim]

Right now, Banshee has one huge playlist containing all my music (and audiobooks, podcasts etc.) in a disoarganized manner. Some albums are imported in the right order but with newer version there just get imported in seemingly random patterns. When I move files around or rename them and import my music folder again the whole mixng gets worse everytime.

A typical use case for a media player includes IMO to play a specific album or artist. With banshee, that means i have to create a new (smart) playlist every time I want to do that.

I am used to have a selector for album/artist/genre... at the top of the "big playlist". It's what rhythmbox and every other iTunes like player has.

So my question is: Is the non-existance of this UI a deliberate choice and I'm missing something here? How am I supposed to use Banshee?

This is an honest question although it might sound a little bit rantish.

[flickerfly]

I believe the intention is to use the search bar instead of that sort of thing, but there was a plugin developed once to provide what you spoke of. I think it never made it past the 0.10 series. It was called the browser plugin if memory servers. Anyway, as I've become familiar with the combination of the search and Smart Playlists, I've become happy with the interface. It usually isn't hard to find what I want quickly.

I'd like to be able to see the search made even more powerful before the addition of a browser plugin.

[abock]

Sorting is *very* much improved in 0.11.3+. I just made a number of improvements today as well against trunk.

The import order is unsorted for performance reasons, and this makes the most sense. Basically, even if your files "appear" to be in order on the file system, in reality they are not (by file name). When walking the directory structure, files appear in the order they were last modified. The inodes give you the file system order.

Once imported, you can sort by track, artist, or album, and you'll now get logical ordering and grouping.

The lack of a browser UI is indeed intentional. I do not like the paradigm. In the future, there will be something akin to a browser, but it probably will not be the genre->artist->album pane many are used to.

I find that the new proper sorting support and the search filter works very well, especially when coupled with static and smart playlists.

[Alex]

I also prefer the smart playlist system - I switched to Banshee from Rhythmbox today and I'm already using smart playlists, whereas I never used the browser UI in Rhythmbox.
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[molgar]

Speaking of which, when will Banshee monitor a specific location for new music, without the need to manually import it? I recall there was a plugin that did that, but was deprecated.

[miguel]

Aaron,

I understand that you might not like the iTunes-like panels. We have also discussed in the past the MediaPlayer-like tree that gets populated with songs.

There are plenty more models, but you do not shed any light into what you would consider acceptable.

Do you have any prototypes in mind, any sketches of what this would be like?

One option would be to have the information browsing be a tree that gets auto-populated as you open it (artists, kind, albums).

Miguel.

[lithium]

First, search is quite broken in head ATM (crashes banshee) and that made me realize how much I use the search now. If it works. it's really nice.

BUT:

In the long term I don't think there is anything that can substitute the artist/genre browser. For large collections it is just not possible to do the "populated trees" as miguel says, look at players like Amarok how this would look like.

You can say what you want concerning the browser but for large collections and mostly large unknown collections (think: friend's computer, party...) it really helps to get an overview about that kind of music is available.

I guess we'll have to wait for 0.13.x anyway but then it would be nice to have a browser at least as an optional plugin.

[mkoby]

After reading this topic and several others on this very issue, I really fail to see the logic in not having some form of a browser in Banshee. I guess because people have gotten away from viewing music in the way of albums and rather in singles that this kind of reasoning makes sense.

However, plenty of folks out there still view music in the form of Artist-->Album and the lack of a browser in Banshee, in my opinion, is something that is crippling the software in a major way. I think having a browser (even if hidden by default) will truly help Banshee gain more ground because right now, I prefer RhythmBox to Banshee for the inclusion of a browser that lets me pick an album to listen to.

Having to create playlists for albums is both time consuming and unnecessary, especially since you already have album data in the metadata.

As a result, I would fully support the addition of a browser into Banshee, even in the form of an official plugin would add a great feature to Banshee and really seal it's dominance in Linux music players.
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[Spie]

Take a look at the roadmap for 0.13.x:
http://banshee-project.org/Roadmap

[zietbukuel]

Yes please, I mis the browser feature as well, I like the Genre/Artist/Album browser so right now I prefer Rthythmbox over Banshee just because of the browser as I have a fairly large library of music, so a browser would be a REALLY nice feature just like Itunes and Rhythmbox, I hate creating play lists and searching... Thanks!