Menu

#89 General feedback and features I'd need to switch to Zinf

open
nobody
None
5
2006-11-15
2006-11-15
Anonymous
No

My name Draciron Smith
email draciron@yahoo.com

I've been a long time XMMS users. I'm rather frustrated with thier playlists and used Zinf for a week. Sound quality was excellent. It is a really cool feature to have built in e-music support. The edit ID tags interface is excellent. I love that Zinf is case insensitive. Even more so that you have a choice. Case sensitivity is one of my biggest gripes about XMMS. Half of my Soundgarden tunes have a Captital first letter, half a lowercase for example. A real pain when I'm looking for a specific file. Especially when all my other file tools like K3b, Krusader, etc are case insensitive about file sorting. I also love the group organization box. Would REALLY REALLY like to shrink it down. It takes up WAY too much space.

OS Linux FC3 using KDE desktop. Zinf version 2.2.5

Problems.
Using My music doesn't load song information.

Using My Music
Out of the 1500 files I pulled into Zinf only about 400 showed up with an artist name. In XMMS until I stoped using ID3 tags I had about 100 that showed up with bad names. When I loaded using the shift select option 1400 of them showed up. Most are still not showing the artist. I'm assuming XMMS parses the title and extracts the artist using what is pretty much the standard format of artist - songname which is what I found in the ID3 tags of songs showing no artist in Zinf but showing an artist in XMMS. The fields I have chosen to display are Title, Artist, Time, Location

A side gripe about that. The default layout had all this information way off the screen. Took me five minutes to adjust the fields to get the information slid over far enough to be visible and I had to make the playlist huge as there was no way to hide the file selection window or shrink it.

No tool tips. Still not real sure what a couple of the buttons do. I use 1280 x 960 resolution and Zinf is tiny on my screen. There is no way to enlarge it so I can see the icons more clearly.

No way to switch away from ID3 tags so no way to clear up the last 100 with bad ID3 tags. 100 files I might be willing to edit by hand. The 1100 that Zinf doesn't see, not a chance. It will play them, just won't tell me what it's playing. In the file list it's a blank. Not even a file name the first time. This time it's almost all just the song name, sometimes not even correct on that.

Was having a problem in that the cursor wouldn't update showing me the file currently playing. I could select one to play, couldn't see what was playing at that second. This problem also went away after I rebooted in preperation to move to FC6.

Lack of access to the file name. This is especially important to me when working on my stuff. I may have identical ID3 tags but the files are mixes or revisions and it's crucial that I can see the filename at times. With XMMS I have to right click to get at this info. I'd love to be able to add that to the information scrolling accross the Marque.

I use multiple desktops. It was a real pain to have to switch back to another desktop, wait for the swap deamon to bring everything back out of swap just to skip a song.

I've included asnapshot of my desktop, two if it will let me to show you what I mean about filename display.

Discussion

  • Nobody/Anonymous

    noparsing of artist from tag

     
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    Logged In: NO

    Ignore the lack of filename access. I found it WAY WAY WAY out to the right.

     

Log in to post a comment.