GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 349924
Enable "watch library" by default
Last modified: 2018-05-24 11:43:53 UTC
Is there a reason why "watch library" isn't enabled by default? That the setting exists at all kind of smells like "unbreak my application please" (http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html)... ;)
Because not everbody wants every file in every subdirectory of the library directory automatically added to the library.
But surely, those people are the exception to the rule... I've also seen not having "watch library" confuse the living daylights out of ordinary people.
Martin: I think you're right. The first thing we need to do is define *what* exactly the "Library" is. One of the problems in my opinion is that we try to satisfy both the people who want to manually organize their music folders and the people who just want things to work.
If there was a sane default for the library location (and certainly *not* the users home directory), then it might make sense. Isn't that the purpose of the first-run wizard? I wouldn't mind "watch" being set to "on" by default there so long as the user selects a default directory that probably isn't the home directory. There were some earlier bug reports (can't find numbers right now) in which people got bitten by rhythmbox attempting to check ever file in their home directory. ~ /Music might be a sensible default.
The first run wizard can't die fast enough. The idea that new users have some prefered location for the music database is insane. Can you imagine iTunes doing this? We should probably just use ~/Music and maybe still allow the user to change it in preferences.
One wrinkle with the whole library watching is that rhythmbox doesn't truly organise the music files in the same way that iTunes does, e.g. if you have the "Let iTunes organize my music" option in iTunes (which is the default I think) then if you import mp3 files from some other location, it will copy them to the iTunes directory and uses the ID3 tags to write the folders and locations. This means that it continues to watch all the files in that directory. With rhythmbox if you import files from somewhere else other than the default library location, then the library watch won't work on those files AFAIK, since it doesn't copy them to the directory where watching works. I could be wrong about that (since I don't use library watching) but it worked that way when I tested it a while back. So long as watching can be disabled via the pref dialog and/or gconf and the library directory can be specified in the pref dialog and/or via gconf, I don't mind. ~/Music/ makes sense as a default.
Perhaps if this is an "unbreak me" feature for the typical user then this should be removed from the preference ui, but remained a gconf preference for the power users.
Ping? Installed Fedora 7 recently. It is shipped with xdg-user-dirs and a Music dir is created in ~ and I can't remember clicking through the wizard. Rhythmbox's Library location is set to this dir but since "Watch my library for new files" is off by default... well... nothing really happens when I put music in my Music dir. ;) (Maybe this is a Fedora bug. That is, if they have disabled the wizard and so on but it would be really good to have this fixed properly upstream, with xdg-users-dir getting more widely adopted.)
Filed bug 448330 for xdg-user-dirs support.
Just noticed that xdg-user-dirs support is in 0.11 (only 0.10 in Fedora 7). Ignore the blathering about Fedora in comment 8. Sorry for the spam.
(In reply to comment #10) > Just noticed that xdg-user-dirs support is in 0.11 (only 0.10 in Fedora 7). > Ignore the blathering about Fedora in comment 8. And the Fedora version already uses xdg-user-dirs, even 0.10...
I have just come from downstream https://bugs.launchpad.net/rhythmbox/+bug/144334 I have experienced from promoting Ubuntu to basic users and as much as they like the OS they don't understand why they need to re-import their music to see new files. They think it is silly. Experienced users such as ourselves, know that their is probably an options somewhere to disable the automatic scan.
Ping? (Do you take patches? ;)
Recent Rhythmbox is using ~/Music as the default music library location, could be possibly revisit this bug? Maybe now would be a good time to enable this feature by default.
Created attachment 227571 [details] [review] patch This patch sets the checkbox for "Watch my library..." to enabled by default.
This isn't the right way to do it. Instead, the default for the monitor-library key in the gsettings schema should be changed to 'true'.
Created attachment 228649 [details] [review] updated patch An updated patch that sets enabled library watch using GSettings.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/rhythmbox/issues/219.