Awesome player

[Nicolò Barbon]

Didn't know where to write some compliments... if that's the wrong
place I'm sorry and please delete this.
Guys, your work it's awesome!
It almost a year since I started using QL and right now I really
cannot manage an audio-library without it (I mean, I tried the new
features of another player -strongly publicized- I used to use while
ago and there's no competition).
REGEX to search... that's really THE thing, and also, the possibility
of changing every tag-display part (with CONDITIONALS!)
Really, back then you had a really good idea and now I owe you my
sincere thanks.

[W. Martin Borgert]

Quoting "Nicolò Barbon" <smilz...@gmail.com>:
> Didn't know where to write some compliments... if that's the wrong
> place I'm sorry and please delete this.

OK, let me add some praise of quodlibet here. I tried at least a
dozen of music players (alsaplayer, audacious, beep, cmus, decibel,
listen, moc, mp3blaster, pytone, rhythmbox, xmms, zinf). Not one
of them satisfied my needs, while quodlibet just rules. Thanks!

[Juan Manuel Santos]

Hoping that this is not burdensome on everybody who reads this list, let me +1
the previous 2 posters and state that there is no player that handles existing
playlists like QL does (and those that more or less do, are so heavy that they
become unusable).

I always wanted to contribute something back to QL (I am a Python coder). I
know that the issue tracker is a good place to start, but there could be a
digest of the required patches/features posted here so everybody who reads
this list can pick one and try to implement it.

Cheers and thanks again for the greatest player :)

[Fergus Bremner]

I second Tim's point, since I had an identical experience (right down to being a classical music listener [think, 16 versions of Salome]): QL is too modest in displaying it's stellar - unique - capabilities.

In particular, the first launch window, shrunken and empty is actively misleading.

A little UX TLC might not go amiss.

-Fergus

On 28.10.2012, at 02:45, Tim K <kell...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm a big classical collector and I've been putting off fully digitizing my huge collection because the players are only good for pop music. I actually went back to Quodlbet - and spent a little time with it this time - and was blown away that it could actually READ THE TAGS I PUT IN MY MUSIC and I could configure it to display ALL of it.

The problem is, it isn't immediately obvious what it can do. The few times I looked at it before I assumed it was like any other player, 'cause that's what it initially looks like.

Now I just have to fix all my tags because they are all wrong because of years of trying to "fake" out the lesser music players so that my collection would even make sense.

[Nick B]

Thanks all for the reports and positive feedback. A lot of hard work has
and does still go into making QL do the right thing, with power and
flexibility that is hard to match in other players.

This said I fully agree with Tim and Fergus, but perhaps in a wider
sense too. QL's power is often hidden behind unusual places. Given that
after years of using and hacking QL I still occasionally find new
features, it'd be interesting to see how long did it take people before
finding out about, say:

1. querying syntax for ANDs and ORs.
2. launching additional browsers (and the power this can bring)
3. how to use the global filter
4. how the queue works, and that playing mode is independent of the
queue's playing mode (random or not)
5. right-clicking the information area to allow editing of tags, rating
for the current song
6. clicking an empty CD icon to add new album art
7. right-clicking on the play icon to select stop afterwards
8. how splitting on tags works
9. right-clicking the search bar to allow limiting of results, and
weighting
10. about plugins that provide what are core features in some players:
e.g. album art downloading, auto-library updating, force writing of
tags, musicbrainz lookup, export playlists.

If anything this is a reiteration of the need for some technical writing
/ further enhancement of the wiki, but also perhaps of some further work
on the UI. There is
http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=996 which touched on
difficulty users have with searching in particular.

I've discussed some of this with Christoph and there are a few issues
being raised. We could do with help from new users here (devs are
typically seasoned users already).

@Fergus, would you mind opening a feature request re-iterating what you
just said here about initial window etc?

Thanks
Nick

On 28/10/12 06:59, Fergus Bremner wrote:
> I second Tim's point, since I had an identical experience (right down
> to being a classical music listener [think, 16 versions of Salome]):
> QL is too modest in displaying it's stellar - unique - capabilities.
> In particular, the first launch window, shrunken and empty is actively
> misleading.
> A little UX TLC might not go amiss.
> -Fergus
>
>
> On 28.10.2012, at 02:45, Tim K <kell...@gmail.com

[Peter Schwede]

Am 28.10.2012 17:23, schrieb Nick B:
> 9. right-clicking the search bar to allow limiting of results, and
> weighting

I am using QL some years now (mostly in Browser mode), I didn't know
this feature.

What does this "Rating"-Checkbox do exactly?

Picture:
http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/bildschirmfoto-29102012-003458.php

Greetings,
Peter

[Christoph Reiter]

2012/10/29 Peter Schwede <sp4z...@googlemail.com>:

> What does this "Rating"-Checkbox do exactly?

Weighted random selection.

See http://groups.google.com/group/quod-libet-development/browse_thread/thread/63135429239e3c45/d624a1845be3558b#d624a1845be3558b

[Nick B]

On 25/11/12 15:43, Richard Faulkner wrote:
> I was looking for a place to comment on Quod Libet as well, so I'll
> jump in behind you. I've been using much, but my library contains over
> 100,000 songs and Quod Libet handles it without *any* hiccups.

This is excellent (and useful) news; we've been interested in seeing how
some of the newer (and older) features are scaling and this is
definitely the largest library I've heard of to date.


> If there were anything I would add to Quod Libet it would be the
> ability to download and display the lyrics for the current playing
> song similar to gmusicbrowser. That though is no big thing
> as Quod Libet usually remains minimized unless I'm importing music
> into my library. I have no skills as a coder so my

Local lyrics are displayable (in a fairly rudimentary way) with the
newish "viewlyrics" plugin. Downloading is another thing, and there are
offline tools around, but this is one area I hope to get some time to
work on for 2.6 actually. See
http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=940 for a display
area and http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=54 for some
old discussion about lyrics downloading.


> contributions to the project at best would be to test the
> functionality with a relatively large library. I can safely say that
> it passes that test with flying colors.

Thanks :)

[Eric Casteleijn]

On 25/11/12 15:43, Richard Faulkner wrote:

I was looking for a place to comment on Quod Libet as well, so I'll jump in behind you. I've been using much, but my library contains over 100,000 songs and Quod Libet handles it without *any* hiccups.

This is excellent (and useful) news; we've been interested in seeing how some of the newer (and older) features are scaling and this is definitely the largest library I've heard of to date.

I've just recently passed the 200K mark, and aside from using quite a bit of memory (which is to be expected with the way the library works) QL still works reliably and fast. It beats the pants off of Rhythmbox and Banshee in this respect, because they take minutes to start up, and crash often, though I can't say for sure if that's because of the size of the library or due to other problems.

I have been running the mercurial head (and svn before that) for years, and that has worked more reliably than released versions of any other player period. (And in the rare cases I was able to report a bug in the development version, it invariably got fixed very quickly.)

--
- eric casteleijn