Wish-list of podcast and radio enhancements

[mxyzptlk]

This bug report was prompted by my comment at http://www.vimtips.org/2008/09/11/exaile-03-roundup/; Aren asked if I would submit the following.

Podcasts:

Since the new Banshee came out, there's a few things that I think Exaile could use to really make a dent amongst the Gnome players, and Amarok. These are mainly related to podcast management.

A few things Amarok has that are VERY useful, are missing in other Gnome players, and I would love to see in Exaile:

In the podcasts list, the ability to categorize/group podcasts by adding folders. In Amarok, you can create folders under the Podcast directory in Playlists. This means you can group, say, News podcasts under a News folder, Politics podcasts under a Podcasts, folder, Tech podcasts under etc. Furthermore, in Amarok you can update a category by right-clicking the folder and refreshing just that folder -- very, very handy. It looks like this would be possible in Exaile, but right now there's no option from the tools, and if you right-click Podcasts, you only get Add Feed, Refresh Feed, and Delete Feed.

Keep the ability to chose what directory podcasts are saved to, but add the ability to associate a track from a feed with a downloaded file. Amarok doesn't handle all enclosures quite right; if you try to download any feeds from NBC/MSNBC, you run into problems (every file has the same name). With Amarok, sometimes a refresh will bring down multiple instances of the same file, sometimes it won't show a feed in the right order. These aren't issues with Rhythmbox or Banshee, and I can't tell with the current Exaile because right now fetching podcasts just seems broken (see below). But if you have to use different applications for certain podcasts, a handy feature is the ability to associate an episode from a feed with an already-downloaded track. For instance, Amarok gives me more control over how the transfer to my device than any other application. However, it won't handle the NBC podcasts. I have to download NBC podcasts via Banshee, and then associate an episode with the downloaded-file in Amarok so I can transfer to my device. It's a very useful feature. This is also handy if for some reason a freed breaks and you have to re-add it; you don't have to download a load of files that you may already have. If one were to switch from Amarok to Exaile, that would also mean one wouldn't have do re-download a load of podcasts.

One other way to handle this would be for the application to automatically recognize already-downloaded files and automatically associate them. THAT would be cool.

Break podcasts out from the Radio tab into its own tab, or re-organize the two into something like Online Content.

Please let me choose if I want to open information, etc. in another tab. It doesn't take long before I have 8 tabs open, and I'm just going through a couple tracks. Tabs could be useful with the above-mentioned categorized folders -- i.e. click on a folder for, say, "Tech" and a tab opens with all the tech feeds. (This could be rather like the way Nautilus allows you to choose spatial mode or not -- Exaile could allow you to choose tab mode or not.)

I'm not sure why some feeds just don't work, and not a single feed will show if something is downloaded. For instance, take the feed for American Public Media's show Marketplace -- http://marketplace.publicradio.org/RSS/marketplace.php. That feed works fine in Amarok and Banshee, but no episodes show in Exaile.

Podcasts should also appear more logically organized in the download folder. Right now, in Amarok and Banshee, podcasts are downloaded to a folder of that show's name inside the podcast download folder, and the episode appears with a readable name inside that folder. For instance, take the Washington, DC NPR program, The Diane Rehm Show. They recently did an hour about the financial meltdown in the U.S. The information on the site shows that the title for this episode is WAMU_95169618.mp3. Both Amarok and Banshee download this file to a folder inside the podcast download folder called WAMU_The Diane Rehm Show Podcast. The file is called WAMU_95169618.mp3. If for some reason I need to get to that file and don't have a application open, I can find it easily. This is something I need to do; I teach, and sometimes I need just a clip from a program. I can use Audacity, and just go straight to the file because it's obvious where it is.

However, Exaile doesn't do this. Exaile downloads the same episode as 1b2d749e81c61b658d7bc1fb27a8c1c2.mp3, and places the file at the top level inside the podcasts download folder. If I downloaded a number of podcasts and needed to find one show for some reason amongst those, I'd need to open each one and listen to it. Furthermore, Exaile doesn't show me that the file is even downloaded. Not very handy.

Radio:

The Saved Stations / Radio Streams set-up doesn't really make sense right now. First, they could be condensed to just one tab or folder for Radio. Amarok/Banshee also lets you categorize your stations (News, Screaming Monkeys at Zoos, Techno Oldies, whatever). The streams then appear in the categories. It seems Exaile wants to do something like this, but it doesn't make sense.

If you want to add a station, you must click the + at the bottom (a right-click option would be useful here). Then you add the info and stream url -- easy enough. But that actually creates a station, like a folder; to add another stream under Saved Stations, you go through the same process. However, there's this strange right-click behavior for an already-saved stream. If you right-click on a saved stream, it lets you add another stream to that stream. So say you add a stream for BBC World Service -- again, easy enough. Right-click on that stream info, and you realize you can add a stream to that station. Say you add an NPR stream. Now when you click on your saved station for BBC, it opens a tab that lets you stream BBC or NPR. But all the top-level info is for a BBC station -- confusing after the fact.

Rather, when you add a station (by clicking + or, hopefully, with a right-click), it shouldn't ask you for the URL. Right now you can't do that. This "Saved Station" would be more like folder that you can use to categorize stations. So rather than adding your BBC info, you make your station "News," and when you right-click on that station then adding a stream to the station makes more sense. So when you load up the station "News," you get possible streams for BBC, NPR, etc.

Finally, when you click on a stream located in one of those stations, it opens yet another tab. This is rather related to the "give me a choice for using tabs" idea. There's really no reason to open so many tabs -- just making the stream information go from regular to italics would suffice. Just in testing out the stream information for this bug report, I had to open a couple streams a couple times, and soon I had 7 tabs open, many for the same streams.

I really want to see a GTK music app that can incorporate the functionality of Amarok, and I hope these suggestions are helpful to that end.

[mxyzptlk (mxyzptlk)]

Just wanted to add one last thing that keeps me from going away from Amarok -- Amarok's ability to configure "Transfered files locations" on a device. This is something lacking in all the current GTK music applications that I know of.

With this feature, Amarok allows you to decide how files are transferred to and appear on your device. This is handy with podcasts -- especially when you group podcasts like I suggest above. For instance, I can set Amarok to transfer files as /%album/%title.%filetype. This means they appear on my device as SomeAlbum/SomeTitle,mp3. I can also choose what directory they transfer to on my device -- top level, inside a Podcasts folder, wherever.

Why this is good: It saves a lot of clutter on the device itself. You can set exactly how you want files to transfer to your device, and it becomes easier to find them. In my case, I can have a News folder on my device, and throw my News podcasts inside that folder, so I get something like News / Global Update / globalnews_20080926-1734a.mp3. Any Global Update episodes I transfer will appear inside the correct folder. I can then set my device to just play all the files in my News directory, and I'm set.

Right now this is not possible on a GTK app. I submitted a bug about this to Banshee, and was told "this seems to be very counter to one of the implicit goals of Banshee: to abstract the user from the filesystem. I don't think Banshee's place is to manage folders." To me, it's counter-intuitive not to give the user choice. Right now, many podcasts will not have an artist, or the artist name changes in the metadata according to subject or guest. So Banshee will through a load of podcasts into an Unknown Artist folder, with Album folders below that, and then the files below that. It means drilling down an extra step when I look for something, and I grit my teeth each time because Amarok allows me to set all that ahead of time. Or if the artist metadata changes because of the guests on a particular show, I can end up with three Artists folders for the same damn show, and inside those three Artists folders are Album folders that are identical to each other. All that could be taken care of by just setting it to transfer as /%album/%title.%filetype, and there's no clutter and it's easier to find files.

This could be set in the preferences under Radio -- or better, have some basic Podcast preference settings under its own subject.

[Ubuntuxer (johannes-schw)]

I agree about everything, what you write about the radio and podcast in Exaile.
Exaile can learn something from Amarok and Banshee and achieve one's aim to be the best player under Gnome. It would be great, if the developers implemt your ideas in version 0.3.

[mxyzptlk (mxyzptlk)]

Saw this was recently confirmed -- can't wait to see what comes of it.

[reacocard (reacocard)]

> Saw this was recently confirmed -- can't wait to see what comes of it.

Don't hold your breath. A lot of this won't happen until later in the 0.3.x series. However some of the simpler parts may end up in 0.3.0 or 0.3.1. There's a LOT of really good ideas in this bug - too many to handle all at once. :)

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

Saved radios is broken in Alpha 3, and some preliminary bits of this could be implemented while fixing it.

[Andrey Yurkovsky (andrey.yurkovsky)]

I can't find downloaded podcasts at all :(
Exaile 0.3.2.0 & Ubuntu 10.10

Can anyone say where are they?