Not playing songs with spaces in file names?

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Martin T. Sandsmark at 14/05/09 23:49 did gyre and 
gimble:
> On Friday 15. May 2009 00:32:08 Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> You have a very strange view of the term "Everything"... I don't want to
>> start a flame war but Phonon covers just a handful of apps on Linux,
>> whereas pulse is trying to cover *all* apps regardless of what audio
>> system they are coded to use [...]
> 
> I think you misunderstood me. IMHO, Phonon is mostly for making the life 
> easier for developers. Want to play multimedia in your application? 5 lines of 
> code, shazam.

I totally buy into that - I didn't mean to dispute anything Phonon 
related or say that phonon itself is not a good idea. Personally I quite 
like the principle behind it, even if other people out there in 'net 
land disagree. I'm all for simplicity.

> I use plenty of non-phonon applications, and everything "just works", without 
> Pulseaudio ;-)

Well I agree that things may "just work", but when as Jeff already 
replied in this branch of the thread, with the "Everything 
Amarok-related" clarification, *I'd* like to see the GUI used to be one 
that works for all apps - not just Everything Amaork-related. I 
appreciate this is not necessarily the best place to say this but in the 
interests of closing off the thread on a less acrimonious note, I'll 
carry on for a little while :p

I've gotten a lot of enquiries and bug reports from people who say that 
they've selected their preferred audio device in KDE's System Settings 
but when they use RhythmBox (arg blasphemy! :p) it doesn't use those 
settings.

Now those of us in the know can laugh and scoff at this noobie's 
ignorance of the limits of the KDE4 system settings audio panel, but 
what I'd rather do is actually make this config panel's settings work 
with RhythmBox!

Doing this is fairly simple if the system uses PulseAudio and the device 
preference and routing logic is off-loaded to this layer. Now at 
present, we (as in Mandriva) ensure that the KDE System Setting sound 
preferences do not show any devices when the user has chosen to use 
PulseAudio - it displays a message to run pavucontrol instead. This is a 
fairly simple workaround to a UI problem and it's certainly not my long 
term goal (for one pavucontrol, despite being flexible/powerful, is 
quite ugly/confusing in many ways and is certainly not a KDE application!).

So what I want to do eventually is make the System Setting properly 
pulse aware. If the user uses pulse (I'm not going to force this down 
anyone's throat!), then I want the System Settings to effectively act as 
the pavucontrol for KDE (sans volume control and per-app device-choice 
preferences). By doing this, the preferences set in System Settings 
*will* work for all apps, not just Phonon apps, and as a result I'll get 
a lot fewer user queries and everything just work nicely.

I believe (hope!) this is a laudable aim.


> I mean, Pulseaudio is probably terrific if you want to stream sound from 
> random applications (that happen to work with pulseaudio) over the network

While this is true (it's how I have my own home sound system 
configured), it does go beyond that too. May users contact me all the 
time wanting to use their fancy USB sound system on their laptops when 
it's available but use the built in system when it's not. Now phonon on 
it's own can do this, but like I say above, I don't want to limit the 
system to a phonon-only world and I want the the configuration I've 
specified to work for *all* applications.

By doing the above I'm hoping to achieve that goal.


I hope you can see that this is ultimately a good aim, that most users 
would appreciate (especially considering pulseaudio is default in most 
distros) even if you would  prefer not to use it yourselves.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
   Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
   Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
   PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
   Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]