Bug 99684 - audioscrobbler gives insufficient feedback
Summary: audioscrobbler gives insufficient feedback
Status: RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Alias: None
Product: amarok
Classification: Applications
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: 1.2
Platform: unspecified Linux
: LO wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Amarok Developers
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-02-18 11:10 UTC by Lee Braiden
Modified: 2006-06-11 12:32 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Lee Braiden 2005-02-18 11:10:46 UTC
Version:           1.2 (using KDE KDE 3.3.2)

Filing this as a bug report, since lack of feedback seems important to me.  Sorry if wishlist would be more appropriate.

Amarok doesn't provide any feedback when you have no recommendations from audioscrobbler.  For example, when you have a new account, or have wiped your music stats from the audioscrobbler site, and then choose the "Append Suggestions" option in Amarok, absolutely nothing happens.  I wasn't even sure the option had something to do with audioscrobbler.

Basically, the only indication I have that audioscrobbler support is working is that, while playing songs, the status bar indicates when a song is submitted.  No indication whatsoever that this is having an effect, or ever will have an effect.
Comment 1 Gilles Schintgen 2005-02-18 13:41:52 UTC
I agree that at first I didn't know what "Append Suggestions" was all about since nothing happened. IIRC I could even activate it without having an AudioScrobbler account. Perhaps an explanatory message at first use would be appropriate.
Comment 2 Sami Nieminen 2005-02-19 21:40:01 UTC
Your profile does not have anything to do with audioscrobbler suggestions. You don't even need to have a profile to make "Append Suggestions" work. The feedback for not getting suggestions is that the suggestions do not appear on the context browser (and nothing is appended also). I wonder what kind of feedback you want? Of course there is debug feedback, if you run amaroK from console. At least we are not going to show error dialog or such, but maybe a similar feedback as when submitting tracks would be suitable (a message on statusbar).

BTW, appending to playlist takes place when 50% or 4mins of the track has been played. That's the same for submitting the track on your profile.

Anyway, I'll consider adding some explanation on first use of "Append Suggestions".
Comment 3 Lee Braiden 2005-02-19 22:35:43 UTC
Now I'm more confused about the whole thing :D

On the error message: if I choose append suggestions, and suggestions CANNOT be appended for some reason, I would absolutely expect an error message to be displayed.  Better yet, I would expect that the option wasn't available in the menu.  If you can select append suggestions, but nothing is going to happen, that's as strange to me as allowing people to select File/Print, but have nothing printed, and no error message.

Are you saying that the append suggestions option will work/is working, even though I'm not getting any suggestions?  If so, why?
Comment 4 Sami Nieminen 2005-02-19 22:54:19 UTC
Append suggestions will only append something to playlist if:

- You have "Retrieve similar artists from Audioscrobbler" checked in Scrobbler config
- Audioscrobbler returns some similar artists for the artist that you are listening to (i.e. the artist you are listening to is known by Audioscrobbler)
- You have some tracks by those similar artists

Ok, so you are listening to music and have the option "Append suggestions" enabled. Some of the artists that you listen to return similar artists that you don't have, so you want all those times an error dialog opened? Well, I don't want, as it's completely ok for me that for some of the played tracks there are no similar artists on my collection.

And we only know whether appending to playlist is going to work AFTER we know what you play, and receive the results from Audioscrobbler. So we can't just disable the menuitem because the song you are going to play next won't generate any results.

But if we show some info text about the functionality of Append Suggestions when user enables it first time, I guess then we don't need any error messages in cases when there is nothing to append.
Comment 5 Lee Braiden 2005-02-19 23:22:31 UTC
Yep, I get it now.

I guess I use amarok quite differently from how it's intended, and that threw me off.  I simply keep one playlist, with all my songs on it.  So naturally, nothing new would be suggested, and the whole thing seemed a bit strange/pointless to me.

There's another bug filed related to the suggestion of stuff from your own collection, versus suggestion of new artists/songs you might want to know about, so I guess that will help clarify things.

Thanks for helping me work this out, anyway :)
Comment 6 Christian Muehlhaeuser 2005-02-20 03:26:52 UTC
invalid.