The KsCD GUI is mostly just empty, wasted real estate. Its 9 buttons, slider and rotary widget could fit into an area a quarter of the size, instead of being 750 pixels across. Most of the display showing track info is also empty. but there's no way to change the size of the window. The rotary volume control might look like a real stereo volume knob, but it's a crappy abstraction on a computer desktop, a linear slider is a lot easier to use (and the current control doesn't work properly anyway, Bug 132327). Having the Mute button separate from the volume control is a bit strange. Mute is unrelated to the shuffle, looping and tracklist controls, it should be with the volume. The transport controls RW/Play/FF running left-to-right makes sense physically and relates to physical hardware, but Stop/Play/Eject running bottom-to-top is meaningless and wastes more real estate. The Stop and Eject buttons could be combined (if stopped then the button ejects instead of stopping). Also, the Loop and Random icons are backwards (Bug 333499) Reproducible: Always
Created attachment 86126 [details] original, bloated UI
Created attachment 86127 [details] reduced UI Here's a very rough sketch of a shrunk down KsCD, by a non-designer with terrible UI skills, but it takes half the space and is IMHO more logical
There should be a Volume icon above the vertical slider - the one from the KMix applet would be fine.
(In reply to comment #0) > The rotary volume control might look like a real stereo volume knob, but > it's a crappy abstraction on a computer desktop, a linear slider is a lot > easier to use The way rotary pots work in typical music software, such as digital audio workstations, is that once you click on it moving upwards rotates clockwise and moving downwards rotates anti-clockwise. Any horizontal motion is ignored, only vertical motion affects the controller. This allows them to give the visual appearance of a rotary controller, but be significantly easier to control with a mouse or touchscreen, because you only ever move up and down, the direction to move the mouse doesn't depend on the current value (you want it louder, move upwards, you want it quieter, move downwards - simple). The KsCD volume knob requires you to actually move in an arc, if you try moving simply up and down the knob will turn one way or another (depending on its starting position), until it reaches a point where it stops turning. To make fine adjustments to the knob requires quite fine movement with the mouse in a smooth arc - not easy if you use a trackball instead of a mouse. Either the rotary control should be made easier to use or it should be replaced with a slider (as in the mockup in comment 2)
Hi, thanks for the report! Can I interest you in submitting a patch or starting some discussion on the kde-multimedia@kde.org list? Bugzilla isn't terribly useful for requesting big changes to the UI.
Dear Bug Submitter, This bug has been stagnant for a long time. Could you help us out and re-test if the bug is valid in the latest version? I am setting the status to NEEDSINFO pending your response, please change the Status back to REPORTED when you respond. Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!
Dear Bug Submitter, This is a reminder that this bug has been stagnant for a long time. Could you help us out and re-test if the bug is valid in the latest version? This bug will be moved back to REPORTED Status for manual review later, which may take a while. If you are able to, please lend us a hand. Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!
The application is unchanged, everything mentioned here still applies.
KSCD was quietly ejected about two years ago since it never was ported to KDE Frameworks or Qt5. I'm closing this as "sorry, this is never going to be fixed in a newer product." That's not a very satisfying end to this bug, since you -- original submiutter -- have a lot of ideas with the UI itself. But KSCD is dead, unless you pick up the kf5 branch and run with it.
(In reply to groot from comment #9) > That's not a very satisfying end to this bug, since you -- original > submiutter -- have a lot of ideas with the UI itself. But KSCD is dead, > unless you pick up the kf5 branch and run with it. Actually I'm fairly satisfied with that. Better to just get rid of it than keep that UI!