Hi Anpaza,

Well this was really a recurring issue, and we relied on the users sending us files to solve it, but we didn have too much of them. Also it seems that the port of python have problems still with some encondings, so we are looking even outside of canola how to solve it.

Anyhow we can use your help, if you have some files that display the symbols (those funny squares) and we will for sure do what we have been doing tireless: debug debug and try to fix it. A lot of users that complained, helped and we got good feedback from them after some updates.

The more info we add the more cluttered the UI gets, and thats (the cluttler) something that is the basic no-go of canola. Anyhow I do think your critic is valid, as it goes along with your way of consuming your media. But after a lots of users critics in several aspects of the albums organization or missing screens this is the first time I hear that. We had a bug in the beginning that indeed prevent the album to be played in the correct sequence even if it was correctly tagged the music. If the music is correct it will play. If it not, there not miracle or software in the world that will organize it correctly by track order. That more our way, if it can be transparent then it is. If not we think 2,3,4 and wait for more users complaings (this is the ranking system for our priorities) and for example the 2 things that are asked more related to album is : group the cover arts by artist, and gapless playback for those epic/albums. So, I doing my default action, I adding this to the queue, it will be designed anyways (as it is quite fast) just to see how it goes in the screens, and if more users request it will go up in the queue.

Here you got to the point we do wanted to support everyone, but it just not possible, and so a lot of other media players support it, so the power users were covered but the users that we target first are not, so that why keeping the simplicity (and not falling on the KDE style : let put settings for everything ) it very important for us. But as you said, it a matter of taste, and I can assure you if you knew everything that the power users asks, like "make it window mode - because I like to fast switch without pressing the button" and others, you would know what is like to have to keep the simplicity without making everyone hate the thing. In the end, unfortunately is a matter of choosing a target user group, and listen to them first and with higher priority and then implement more suggestions as those becomes universal and not from a niche/harder-to-please-with-ui-oriented-app user group.

Yeah, this is REALLY boring. We have done it all but the media framework + Dbus on the device is really a shortcoming for us. It really brings a "blocker". Atabake is really more like abstraction than everything else, and believed we done it all. The only thing that is closer to do it, is to port libXine, as even without atabake, simple commands to the default maemo media engine are already that delayed. With Xine, MorpheuZ was able to make the gapless playback, but with gstreamer (on the device ) no way. And I have personally confirmed with the Maintainers of gstreamer for the device within the multimedia team. Mplayer is even worse in this matter. So, we are out of luck :/ as the team is even smaller now, we need to pay our bills, so our "other" projects are now on full speed, reducing our ability of finishing porting, optimizing and give it a great shape to libXine. xmmp plugin (crossfade) also gives this ability, but we saw that this would be a burden, as it really xmmp specific.

Don worry We are not that sensitive - kidding - I think we are totally based and really commited to listen to good and bad things. And checking out the history it has been a lot of bad things said. We listen, we design and try to solve it inside our goal, and I think we are going quite well with the "amount" of development that we can dedicate to canola. I glad that I saw your critics and thought "ok, I relief we are on those already " because it shows that we gave the correct amount of attention to them (a lot) and as you can imagine, A LOT of users complained about the gap between songs, the gapless playback (not much about cross fading) and we have been researching ways since beta3.

Even like that, I also like to notice that, any other player on the maemo platform will suffer from several issues like us, and I deeply believe( of course I not comparing our project done by a team with solo developers) that in a lot of aspects we are light years ahead of them, or our infrastructure is really solid to build on top of. So for now is a matter of time, a matter of finally convincing the managers to let us release it open source, and then seeing it getting valuable contributions, even better debugging (it's already quite nice) and then see it improve and improve.

But being quite honest : I don believe we will ever be able to please everyone's wish, as this has been shown itself truly impossible. But we believe that we can be a solid choice for a lot of people, as we already know because we also receive a lot of thank you mails and so on. Those (and the critics) are really the fuel, for now, like I in my house to spend my personal hours also working on this project

Thanks for the feedback / critics .. sorry for the long replay.. I talk too much!