[mythtv-users] family acceptance test.

[Simon Hobson]

Speaking (writing) as someone who is still on 0.24.1 (it aint broke ...) and doesn't use MythMusic, and therefore really doesn't have a clue what changes have been made ...

Phill Edwards <philledwards at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't like playlists either. They seem like an unnecessary impost to me. I just want to select an artist or a song and an album and play it. Why should I need to faff about creating playlists.

I'm sort of in the other camp - I generally only play things via playlists. Though I only have my music on my laptop and use iTunes (as an aside, I recently upgraded the version and "really dislike" the UI changes !).
Sometimes I'll play individual tracks, but more often I'm selecting a playlist.

Some examples of why I don't select an artist or album ...
Most of my playlists have multiple albums in them. Often it's because there was "Album", then "Album 2", and so on - though I do sometimes merge "disk1" and "disk2" into one "disk" with double the number of tracks. Other times it's because I've several similar albums which don't logically merge into one "disk" but are very similar material.

Also, there are quite a few tracks which are in more than one playlist - and not all of them are because the same track appears on multiple compilation disks.

> I understand their usefulness, but it shouldn't be the only way of being able to play something. There seems to be a lot of products with a big focus on playlists.

That I agree on - the are useful, but should not be the only way of playing stuff.
I do recall having very briefly looked at MythMusic some time ago when I was setting the system up - and thinking something along the lines of it being clumsy "needs playlists as well as folder view".


Rob Verduijn <rob.verduijn at gmail.com> wrote:

> People please at least try to be polite, the myth devs do a lot of good work.

+1 for that

> I've used it for many years and would really like to give a big THANK
> YOU to all the myth devs and all the people who have contributed to
> the mythtv project.

And a most definite +1 for that.

It's one thing to have an opinion on how something might work better, and I have been known on occasion to make my opinions known. But I always try to remember that unless I'm putting my own efforts into a project, then I have no right to expect those that are to do something because "I want it".

The flip side is that devs, by their very nature, tend to be close to what they are working on and it can be hard to step back and see things as others see them - for one thing, a user looks at "I press this, <something> happens on screen", a dev that's worked on the project is probably thinking "I press this, it triggers process Y, and that does Z ...". Also, someone working closely will probably "do stuff without thinking about it" and from that stances it's really really hard to see a system as fresh user would.

That's not a criticism, just an observation of human nature and we all do it. In the past (with my sys admin hat on) I've had to knock things up to get round some missing feature in a system - only for a user to ask "how the **** does that work ?", or even to come back to it a year or two later and wonder "WTF did I do it that way !".

So while "non contributing" users don't have any right to "demand a feature or way of working" - it is important for those designing the system to take note of comments. In many cases it may well be as simple as the user not realising that something has changed (such as the way some of the recording rules options have moved in recent versions) rather than "gone away".