AudioTube in KDEReview

[David Hurka]

Hi.

> > david at doro:~/kde/audiotube/src$ youtube-dl --version
> > 2020.03.24
> > 
> > After updating youtube-dl via pip (was installed via apt), it worked.
> 
> Just to make sure, the application didn't crash but just displayed the
> error message and also printed it on the command line?

Yes, it didn’t crash but displayed an error message.

> I've been working on packaging a flatpak version that I'm personally
> using most of the time. It will allow to have an up-to-date version of
> youtube-dl even on stable distributions without having to install
> packages using pip.

Cool, that would be very convenient. :)

> > I don’t understand the playlist(?). When I start a track, I expect it
> > to end
> > at the end. But there is an arrow button in the bottom-right, and when
> > I click
> > that I see the album art and something like a playlist with my track
> > at the
> > top, followed by tons of completely unrelated videos. I can remove
> > videos from
> > the playlist, but I can’t add videos? I also can’t reorder it. Can I
> > make it
> > play only the video I have selected?
> 
> Youtube Music works by trying to find similar tracks that you might like
> too, to make it easy to discover new music.
> 
> Unfortunately it seems like the algorithm on Youtube's side didn't work
> too well in your case, and that partly comes from their usual tracking
> of course not working in AudioTube, so it can only give you music that
> other people who liked the track you initially played listened to,
> instead of adapting to your personal taste.
> 
> If you want to put the playlist together yourself, you can use the "Add
> to Playlist" button on the right. The other button is "Play Next", which
> will put the song into the playlist immediately after the currently
> playing one.

Ok, I found the Add to Playlist and Play Next buttons. They only appear 
sometimes on only some search results. Play Next works. I don’t understant Add 
to Playlist. It appends the track to the end of YouTube’s suggestions, which 
means I have to listen that unrelated stuff before I can listen to this track.

Maybe split the playlist in two sections? The ordinary playlist, and after 
that a “Suggested automatically:” section? The second section could maybe have 
a checkbox to disable it. 

> The button "play only audio" only plays the audio of the video the
> message was triggered by. I can add the title to the message to make it
> clearer.

Yes, that should be fine. But I think there should only be the last message 
visible. Offering to play more than one track at once does not seem useful to 
me.

<blabla>
It’s a similar problem with the “Search wrapped” message in Kate. If I quickly 
jump from the last occurence to the first occurence (I actually had to do that 
in a database dump), these messages queue and then they appear and disappear 
one after another for several minutes. Originally, they were placed in the 
center of the view, covering the search result, which made Kate unusable for 
me in that case. :( Thanks for placing your message in a sensible place. :)
</blabla>

---

AudioTube apparently plays only videos that are meant to be music. I can’t 
play ambient sound videos, like I sometimes want to do. Is that an intentional 
limitation? (Ok, I can play these in the browser, because they don’t have 
auto-pause.)

Cheers, David