Windows.... (again)

[Casper van Donderen]

Hi,

Disclaimer: I could have indeed written a bug report (forgive me) &
when I come across as irritated: I am because I can't find out how to
fix it myself.

I've been having a few problems recently with Amarok which I feel are
show-stoppers for a fully-endorsed release of 2.2 for Windows. This
mail will describe what they are and what I tried to fix them.

1) There is a huge circular problem between the collection and the
playlist/tag dialog/anything.
This problem is a bit weird since it does not seem to appear on the
other platforms (otherwise we would have massive amounts of bug
reports about this).
What seems to happen is that once every 2 start-ups a full scan of the
collection is done (only <Useraccount>/Music> works, see 2)). When
this full scan is done it becomes impossible to unfold the collection
in the Browsers widget. Therefore you cannot add music to the
playlist.
On the other hand this has a positive effect. The track length, tags &
album art is shown in the playlist layout. When an incremental scan is
done I get the following debug output:

[4788] amarok: BEGIN: ScanManager::startIncrementalScan
[4788] amarok:   BEGIN: ScanManager::getDirsToScan
[4788] amarok:   END__: ScanManager::getDirsToScan - Took 0s
[4788] amarok:    GOING TO SCAN:
[4788] amarok:    Scanning nothing, return.
[4788] amarok:   BEGIN: ScanManager::writeBatchIncrementalInfoFile
[4788] amarok:   END__: ScanManager::writeBatchIncrementalInfoFile - Took 0s
[4788] amarok: END__: ScanManager::startIncrementalScan - Took 0.002s

This causes the collection to be able to unfold in the browsers
widget, the album art works then in the browsers widget, but if I now
drag an album to the playlist the album art does not show there and
all track times are set to 0:00.
The name of the file is shown in both the collection and playlist
(e.g. not the tag, so '01-krezip-plug_it_in_and_turn_me_on' instead of
'1 - Plug It In & Turn Me On')

The 'edit track details'-dialog in this case also stays completely
empty. a problem there (maybe unrelated) is that in every case, both
when the collection is working and not working location on the bottom
of taht dialog has the '/' prefixed (/C:/). in the dump of the
database it has the correct file name, I fixed that some time ago:
INSERT INTO `urls` VALUES (1,-1,'C:/Users/Casper/Music/Krezip/Best of
Krezip/01-krezip-plug_it_in_and_turn_me_on.mp3',4,'amarok-sqltrackuid://c618623fa92e32d867a4e74ae66c72f1'),

I tried to fix this in Meta.cpp but does not work.

2) The folders in the collection dialog are added to the scan folders
but are not scanned and after restart the checkboxes are all empty.

3) The global keyboard shortcuts used.
This is not something we can really do anything about, since Linux
people never use the Meta-key that is mostly used for global shortcuts
but on Windows this is an non-overrideable key.
I put a post up on MSDN to ask if this was possible:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/463860a2-0b72-4df5-94c2-7be7fca0dd26
The answer to this states that it is possible. the only problem is
WM_KEYDOWN: 'The WM_KEYDOWN message is posted to the window with the
keyboard focus when a nonsystem key is pressed'.
kglobalaccel.exe which handles the global shortcuts in KDE never has
keyboard focus since it is not a visible application.
In Windows 7 we have lost Win+B for next track already, because this
is now the shortcut to go to the systray and the Win+arrows ar enow
used for maximizing and minimizing windows (these do still work in
Vista and below). maybe something for usability people to think about?


I feel this are the big problems we have for Windows now. if this has
been solved we can say that Amarok for Windows is usable. (I did not
test the media device stuff)

Comments please?

Casper