FFE request to disable gapless playback by default in Banshee

[Michael Martin-Smucker]

Binary package hint: banshee

I realize it might be a bit too late for a Feature Freeze Exception, but I'll make my case anyway. :)

Gapless Playback causes some frustrating issues in Banshee. It was discussed upstream that this feature would be disabled before the Banshee 2.0 release if some of these bugs were not fixed[1], but unfortunately, that never happened. A short synopsis of the issues:

Gapless playback marks a song as 'played' at the beginning and end of the song. This means that the play count is incremented twice[2], and the song is scrobbled to Last.fm twice[3]. Gapless also breaks last.fm radio streaming by stopping playback after the second song[4]. But the issue that really prompted this FFE is the fact that gapless playback is also responsible for Banshee's broken integration with the Ubuntu sound menu[5], which displays the wrong song when gapless is enabled.

When you add these flaws together, that's a pretty heavy price to pay for a gapless feature that may not actually work anyway[6]. I realize this is late notice -- the issue with the sound menu was just reported a couple days ago and just linked to the gapless feature this morning -- but if there's any way this feature could be disabled before Ubuntu Natty, I think it would definitely improve the user experience.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=638943
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=621222
[3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617620
[4] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612929
[5] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648498
[6] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647975

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

Got a patch?

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

It's too late.