Notices

Marcelo: I emailed you an example file to your gmail email acct.

Well joe, you for sure installed some really "alpha" app from out there that broke everything for you. In your case I would suggest a flash .

Then start over and avoid those really alpha application

Marcelo

i dont know what...maye flashing would make everthing better.....is there a way to list the installed apps...so i could well know ...which one it could be...maybe thru xterm...

I think dpkg -l lists the installed packages

wow...ill have to do some cutting and pasting...and give it a look....thanks again

Hi there,

A bug in the podcast plugin from beta8 is still here with beta9.

I listen to a podcast of Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/podcast.xml)

Every episode looks fine, except for thursday. Each week, Thursday's episode has a totally messed up title with strange characters.

Can you please have one of your engineers look at this?

Thanks

Hi Genome, yes it was out, unfortunately the team is smaller, and restricted, so a lot of things were out. It's again back on the top list for podcast (this and the time that is taking to refresh the my feeds screen.

Sorry for that..

Marcelo

Canola is a great piece of software, but ...

There are several things that forces me to use other media player although I'm still keeping an eye on the progress of Canola, just because it's so nice and amazingly easy to use.

One thing is that Canola sometimes (too often) shows various strange symbols instead of Cyrillic glyphs, but this problem is tracked on Canola bugtracker and I hope it will be earlier or later solved. I even plan to have a look at this since the component in question (canolad) seems open, so I can fix it myself and submit a patch.

The second problem is that Canola does not display the year of the album and the track number. I'm not even sure the tracks play in the correct order, as I don't see track numbers, and in many albums the order of the tracks plays a important role. Also, when selecting albums it's important to me to see the year of the album, since artist style ofter progresses with years, and sometimes I'd love to hear something from early creations, sometimes from later creations etc.

Of course, this is a matter of taste, so maybe it would be helpful at least to have some way for power users to change the display style for albums and track lists, a feature found in many players. Something like:

# The style for every line in the list of artists
cnl-set-prefs player artist-list-style "-= %a =-"
# The style for every line in album list
cnl-set-prefs player album-list-style "%y. %b"
# The style for every line in the track list of a single album
cnl-set-prefs player album-track-list-style "%n. %t"
# The style for every line in the global track list
cnl-set-prefs player global-track-list-style "%a - %t"
# The style for track information on the "Now Playing" screen
cnl-set-prefs player track-info-style "%n. %t\n%a\n%b"

The tags above are from EasyTag (%a - artist, %b - album, %n - track number, %t - track name, %y - year and so on) but of course this could use other format, for example %(year)s, %(artist)s and so on, Python-style.

And my latest problem with Canola is that the gap between tracks is sometimes too big. Not speaking of the fact that every self-respecting player nowadays supports a 'no-gap' playing mode, some albums contains tracks which have no pause between them, so introducing a 5-sec pause where there should be no pause at all is a kind of disappointing feature for music lovers. Perhaps this would require a change to atabake, so that it could start loading and preparing the music in advance (in a background thread), I don't know.

That's it for now. I hope you don't take this criticism as a offense, I really like Canola and I know I'm very picky about players, but I just have a grain of hope that some day Canola will be perfect enough so that I can forget about other players :-), and I hope telling my impressions/problems can help Canola become better.

Hi Anpaza,

Well this was really a recurring issue, and we relied on the users sending us files to solve it, but we didn have too much of them. Also it seems that the port of python have problems still with some encondings, so we are looking even outside of canola how to solve it.

Anyhow we can use your help, if you have some files that display the symbols (those funny squares) and we will for sure do what we have been doing tireless: debug debug and try to fix it. A lot of users that complained, helped and we got good feedback from them after some updates.

The more info we add the more cluttered the UI gets, and thats (the cluttler) something that is the basic no-go of canola. Anyhow I do think your critic is valid, as it goes along with your way of consuming your media. But after a lots of users critics in several aspects of the albums organization or missing screens this is the first time I hear that. We had a bug in the beginning that indeed prevent the album to be played in the correct sequence even if it was correctly tagged the music. If the music is correct it will play. If it not, there not miracle or software in the world that will organize it correctly by track order. That more our way, if it can be transparent then it is. If not we think 2,3,4 and wait for more users complaings (this is the ranking system for our priorities) and for example the 2 things that are asked more related to album is : group the cover arts by artist, and gapless playback for those epic/albums. So, I doing my default action, I adding this to the queue, it will be designed anyways (as it is quite fast) just to see how it goes in the screens, and if more users request it will go up in the queue.

Here you got to the point we do wanted to support everyone, but it just not possible, and so a lot of other media players support it, so the power users were covered but the users that we target first are not, so that why keeping the simplicity (and not falling on the KDE style : let put settings for everything ) it very important for us. But as you said, it a matter of taste, and I can assure you if you knew everything that the power users asks, like "make it window mode - because I like to fast switch without pressing the button" and others, you would know what is like to have to keep the simplicity without making everyone hate the thing. In the end, unfortunately is a matter of choosing a target user group, and listen to them first and with higher priority and then implement more suggestions as those becomes universal and not from a niche/harder-to-please-with-ui-oriented-app user group.

Yeah, this is REALLY boring. We have done it all but the media framework + Dbus on the device is really a shortcoming for us. It really brings a "blocker". Atabake is really more like abstraction than everything else, and believed we done it all. The only thing that is closer to do it, is to port libXine, as even without atabake, simple commands to the default maemo media engine are already that delayed. With Xine, MorpheuZ was able to make the gapless playback, but with gstreamer (on the device ) no way. And I have personally confirmed with the Maintainers of gstreamer for the device within the multimedia team. Mplayer is even worse in this matter. So, we are out of luck :/ as the team is even smaller now, we need to pay our bills, so our "other" projects are now on full speed, reducing our ability of finishing porting, optimizing and give it a great shape to libXine. xmmp plugin (crossfade) also gives this ability, but we saw that this would be a burden, as it really xmmp specific.

Don worry We are not that sensitive - kidding - I think we are totally based and really commited to listen to good and bad things. And checking out the history it has been a lot of bad things said. We listen, we design and try to solve it inside our goal, and I think we are going quite well with the "amount" of development that we can dedicate to canola. I glad that I saw your critics and thought "ok, I relief we are on those already " because it shows that we gave the correct amount of attention to them (a lot) and as you can imagine, A LOT of users complained about the gap between songs, the gapless playback (not much about cross fading) and we have been researching ways since beta3.

Even like that, I also like to notice that, any other player on the maemo platform will suffer from several issues like us, and I deeply believe( of course I not comparing our project done by a team with solo developers) that in a lot of aspects we are light years ahead of them, or our infrastructure is really solid to build on top of. So for now is a matter of time, a matter of finally convincing the managers to let us release it open source, and then seeing it getting valuable contributions, even better debugging (it's already quite nice) and then see it improve and improve.

But being quite honest : I don believe we will ever be able to please everyone's wish, as this has been shown itself truly impossible. But we believe that we can be a solid choice for a lot of people, as we already know because we also receive a lot of thank you mails and so on. Those (and the critics) are really the fuel, for now, like I in my house to spend my personal hours also working on this project

Thanks for the feedback / critics .. sorry for the long replay.. I talk too much!

I have one suggestion about the Cover Arts screen:

There are some albums which are not from only one artist - i talk about OSTs and generally VA albums (Various Artists). That's bad for most of the Canola screens since it sorts the albums by album name AND artist name, but for Cover Arts section its worse - especially with big several disk VA collections.

So my question is - can you make sorting by artist an option? I personally want to sort mine only on album name.