bogdanb's dashboard

For what it's worth, I added the Intrepid reps to my Jaunty and it installs and runs. I have been getting some bugs (core dumps and such), but I've no idea if they're related to differences in supporting packages or real bugs in Miro.

I understand that _supporting_ users with developer versions might need unavailable resources. But unlike for older versions, it would be beneficial to have repositories and bug fixing for just the next version of a distro: users of alpha and beta distros are essentially free quality assurance.

This way when, e.g., Jaunty is released you'll already have passed through some checking and bug-fixing (or at least identify some bugs in advance), so users that install Jaunty will see a Miro that was already polished rather than a just-then-released version.

This might not make sense for a pre-alpha distro, since that's a moving target, but Jaunty will get released in a couple months, and it's already close to the beta freeze AFAIK.

I think I can actually do the hiding part with just JavaScript, except that sbIGlobalHotkeys is not implemented in 1.0, apparently. And mucking around with custom XPCOM is a bit too much for me; it already took a while to figure out how to control the existing ones via JS.

In fact, if sbIGlobalHotkeys* were added, I could do pretty much everything I need (including ratings, maybe) with just JavaScript. (Although figuring out what to call is a bitch.)

(*: or, even better, something like dcop to control Songbird via scripts. There are plenty of ways of using global hotkeys, it's controlling uncooperative applications like Songbird that is the hard part.)

As Dean said, http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

Also, I use an external tool (MusicBrainz) for organizing files. This means occasionally the folders, file names and some tags will change.

Will Songbird conserve the ratings in that case?

I saw some reference to “hashing” on the website, if that means what I think it means, is it used for recognizing files? Does the hash cover the entire file (and thus change when tags change) or does it cover only the music data? (The latter is also a problem, since I intentionally have copies of the same song with different tags, e.g. for some songs on multiple releases.)

Alternatively, if the ratings are written to the tags as the original poster supposed, which tag are they in? I'd need that to make sure I don't remove it when tagging.

I'm very used to these two from Amarok and I can't switch until I can use them. Which sucks because Amarok is getting really slow with big libraries.

The hotkeys I use all the time are play/pause/stop, next/previous, ratings and show/hide window. The funny thing is that I don't even use Amarok's hotkey system (there were some bugs there), but Compiz's: since Amarok allows querying and setting state via dcop, I have scriptlets triggered by Compiz shortcuts to do what I need. The problem is that Songbird doesn't allow that.

(In fact I don't really need the minimize to tray trick; I just need a shortcut that makes the player window go away & return when needed. The tray icon would just be gravy.)

It would be really cool if Songbird allowed some control from scripts: dcop, dbus, even some sort of Python bindings would be enough if Songbird exposed enough of its internals. Writing a XPI extension is just too hard for some things.