Scrollbars a page at a time, not a huge jump at a time

I've been really annoyed by Rhythmbox scrollbar behavior of late: when I click in the "trough" of the scrollbar, instead of moving the view by about a page up or down, it moves a distance corresponding to the point in the trough clicked. This is pretty bad for large text areas, such as a large music library. I complained to the Rhythmbox folks and Jonathan Matthew replied that this is default gtk behavior. This struck me as odd since I haven't noticed it in other applications, however Jonathan was right.

Google led me to a Gentoo site where ebichu was having the same issue, and posted the solution. I can't thank him there since I don't have a gentoo.org password, but he or she deserves thanks. The fix is to add a line to /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini:

[Settings] 

gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false

So they apparently call this slider warping. Very user-hostile.

Clementine and Guayadeque, Close, but not Quite

I continue to have issues with Rhythmbox 2.96 on Ubuntu and Mint (Mate in both cases) and I will give up on it if I find something better, or maybe they'll finally get around to addressing some of these bugs. It doesn't see new songs added to the library reliably, if I force it to rescan the library it crashes, and it often stops between songs for no explicable reason. A lot of these problems have been around for awhile, which makes me wonder if development or support for Rhythmbox is weak. The last straw was that it seemed to be missing three songs from the Roxy Music "Street Life" album, both on my desktop at home and at work, and the files were there and fine--at least so far as Totem was concerned.

I just tried out Clementine, and with lots of features disabled it looks clean and seems to work well. However, I don't see how to display songs in order of least recently played to most recently played. However, Clementine did show the songs that Rhythmbox was "missing," and I now suspect the issue was that Rhythmbox was categorizing them as Bryan Ferry songs, not Roxy Music. Clementine was smart enough to include them in the Roxy Music search.

Double-checking with Rhythmbox, they are indeed under Bryan Ferry and not missing. So this is not a new Rhythmbox bug.

Guayadeque is promising, but it forces a listening model on the user. Also, I can't get it to use the screen efficiently. If one doesn't keep a bunch of useless crap on-screen, instead there's a big blank area. If there is discussion of layout, saving layouts, restoring layouts, etc., why isn't the layout configurable? I might have another look in the future.

Please don't mention Banshee. It's got too many features I don't need, takes forever to load, takes forever to search a large library, and so far as I can tell does nothing well.

Upshot: I'll keep using Rhythmbox since I don't have time to mess with Guayadeque right now. I'll uninstall Clementine. I'll keep Guayadeque to mess with in the future.

2.96 might be an oldish version of Rhythmbox, but it's what's in the Mint 13 repositories, and there's no sense in wasting much time tweaking a media player--it works or it doesn't  In the next OS upgrade (later this month for me), it'll either work or it won't.

100% Mono-Free

[ I didn't write the below with the intention of coming across as bragging, but if your Linux has Mono and mine doesn't, mine's better. So there.]

I had mono as a college student, and can't say it was a great experience. Lately my Mint and Ubuntu systems have also gotten mono, which is apparently required for Banshee, and is also not a great experience. I'm not sure if it's Banshee that's sickly-slow or mono, but either way, the first thing I do with a new install is make sure neither is present.

Maybe some day Banshee will work well. But that day is not upon us, and so since I prefer to hear a song in the same week in which I click play, it's other players for me.

Package rhythmbox-plugins

It turns out that after removing rhythmbox-plugins, I lost keyboard control of play/pause. This is an inconvenience, so I looked into it a bit more. It appears the package contains:


- Cover art
 - Audio CD Player
 - Last.fm
 - Context Panel
 - DAAP Music Sharing
 - FM Radio
 - Portable Players
 - IM Status
 - Portable Players - iPod
 - Internet Radio
 - Jamendo
 - Song Lyrics
 - Magnatune Store
 - Media Player Keys
 - Portable Players - MTP
 - Power Manager
 - Python Console
 - LIRC
 - Status Icon
 - Visualization
 - Browser plugin to integrate Rhythmbox with itunes

In other words, it contains nothing important except "Media Player Keys". I attempted to re-install, and got this:

29:/home/bup> sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugins

[sudo] password for jdm: 

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

  gir1.2-rb-3.0 libdmapsharing-3.0-2 python-mako python-markupsafe

  zeitgeist-core

Suggested packages:

  python-beaker python-mako-doc zeitgeist-datahub

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  gir1.2-rb-3.0 libdmapsharing-3.0-2 python-mako python-markupsafe

  rhythmbox-plugins zeitgeist-core

0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 264 kB/725 kB of archives.

After this operation, 4051 kB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n

Abort.

Why do I need zeitgeist to use the keyboard to control my audio player?