Decide on the overall strategy for Music

[danirabbit]

This probably needs a user study!

Preview audio? queue only?

Manage local library?

• Tracker?
• Metadata editing?
• Playlists?

Streaming?

• spotify support #638
• Soundcloud integration #223
• [Feature Request] Deezer Integration #273
• Online Radio
• Support DLNA Viewer #278
• Plex

Manage devices?

• Support iPhone music syncing to supported apps via libimobiledevice #635
• Android?
• CDs?

[Suzie97]

Hey @danrabbit, I could help out with this. I can conduct User Studies, Interviews, UX Research and any other related things that might be needed to get this project going.

I just wanted to know if doing so would be productive? Should I start from scratch or have you already planned?

Let me know the status.

Cheers!

[danirabbit]

Hey @Suzie97 thanks for your offer and interest! I think that's likely the direction that should be taken here. @cassidyjames would be the lead for UX projects like this. We're currently out of office until Monday, so I'll make sure to bring it up in our meeting so he can coordinate with you there!

[cassidyjames]

@Suzie97 thanks for your interest! Right now I have kind of three approaches to development I think we could take, but I'd like to validate/inform them with some actual data from users:

1. Continue the current codebase, adapting it if/as needed based on our findings. This is probably less immediate work, but means we keep the maintenance burden longer term.

2. A complete rewrite with a much more limited scope and focus (e.g. playing audio files, but not all the traditional desktop music player features). This may be more initial work, but ideally would lead to lower maintenance costs long-term as it would be much more opinionated and limited in scope.

3. Something more interesting I haven't though of yet. :)

The goal of a user study would be to learn how elementary OS users listen to music, and to learn who uses the elementary Music app and for what. From there, we could organize findings and decide on the best approach that balances users wants/needs/behaviors and our ability to deliver on that.

The most important thing to me is to ensure we're getting good data from a large sample set, but we also have to respect user privacy—it needs to be opt-in, not some sort of automatic data collection, for example.

If you're interested in preparing a user study, I'd love to work with you to determine the types of questions we should ask, and then I could help propagate the study out to our social media, press, etc. We could also consider if there are good ways to tap the existing pool of Music users with an opt-in user study (e.g. some way to expose it client-side in the Music app to frequent users?).

Does this sound like a project you'd like to help with? :)

[Suzie97]

Does this sound like a project you'd like to help with? :)

@cassidyjames, this sound really nice and interesting to me. I am help out with it. I'll be having my semester exams throughout January so the progress might be slow this month. But I can continue to work at full speed in the coming months.

Btw, are we going to communicate in GitHub or use some other service?

[cassidyjames]

@Suzie97 things should live on GitHub for transparency, but we can use the community Slack for realtime communication if that's easier! I'll make sure I'm signed in there, and you can join via the link at the top-right for elementary.io if you're not already there. :)

[hanaral]

Please don't drop playing CDs. I could maybe understand not including ripping/loading music, but there needs to be a way to access audio discs besides the mess that is trying to do it from a file browser. This is namely because much of the world still relies on backwards forms of media such as CDs, but also educational material everywhere still often include CDs (e.g. language books or audioguides).

[cassidyjames]

@hanaral the problem is that afaik none of the core team use CDs for music, and most don't even have CD drives—so it's a use case that's not tested or supported, anyway, but we just hope it works. I think a much better experience there would be installing an app that's explicitly designed to handle CDs rather than shipping largely untested code in a core app.

[hanaral]

I don't particularly mean for music, moreso that there should probably be a way to play audio CDs without access to the internet. I don't mind testing it with my usb drive (a lot of people still use Apple superdrives)

[morridx]

The majority of my music sits as AIFF files on a NAS, so I want to manage my files and their metadata in one application; and I do use a CD drive to rip CDs. For what it is worth, I prefer to own my music, and control my own files, and I consider the ability to rip files from CDs to be essential.

[BAProductions]

Why not bring back the eOS 6 music player layout.