Some people say that Fedora needs mp3 because you can't download music in ogg format -- despite the name, http://www.allofmp3.com/ lets you download music in ogg format, at attractive prices: you decide the format and the bitrate you want, and they charge you by the megabyte. It costs me about $2.50 to download a typical album at 200 kb/s ogg, which is much better quality than you get from iTunes. Now, I'm a command-line guy (I've been into UNIX ever since my wardialer found a machine that belonged to the phone company in the mid 80's), so I find it really easy to do $ cd music $ cd Jefferson-Starship $ cd Red-Octopus $ ogg123 *.ogg particularly when bash helps me out with command line completion. Still, I've been impressed with the GUI in FC5, so let's try playing music with the GUI... I click on an ogg file and it plays in Helix player; that works great. Next I click on "File/Open" and notice that I can only select one file at a time. That's not good. I spend most of my workday in front of a Windows machine that mostly works as a VNC terminal for an RHEL 4 machine in the basement. I listen to music at work with both the Yahoo Music Engine (nice UI, but it screws up all the time) and Winamp (limited UI, but it works consistently). When you hit the "eject" button on Winamp, it comes up with a standard Windows file selector. Honestly I can't remember what does what, but you can use Shift+click and Ctrl+click to either select a range of files or to select individual files. (My unconcious mind knows, so I can do this effortless) You can go to the directory that an album is in, select all the files, and listen to the whole album. Winamp is screwy, because the files play in the opposite order that they should play -- if you drag down from the top, the album will play backwards, but if you drag up from the bottom, the album plays forwards. This is the opposite of the intuitive behavior, but once you get used to it, it's easy to listen to a whole album in Winamp. Helix on FC isn't like that -- shift+click, ctrl+click doesn't do anything different from 'click', so I have to play a whole album at a time. I can't say I know what GUI toolkit that Helix is using to generate it's file selector... I think it's gnome, but it's not like any documentation exists for this stuff... But it's little things like this that make the difference between a GUI that's useful, and a GUI that's not. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
