Usecase dissonance: music vs podcasts/audiobooks

There are some differences between the following use cases:

  1. Listening to music
  2. Listening to podcasts/audiobooks

  Lets have a look:
  1. When listening to random music tracks, you don't want your music player to suddently start playing part of an audiobook.
  2. When looking through your music collection, to find the next track to play, you don't want to see your audiobooks being listed, as that would be noise in that context. The opposite is the case when you want to look through your audiobook-library. In that situation seeing music tracks listed would be noise.
  3. Often audiobooks come in a set of files. You will want to play them in order, and you don't necessarily want to auto-start the next audiobook after the currently playing audiobook has finished. This is more important than for the sets of tracks on music records.
  4. When listening to an audiobook, it is paramount to save state in between sessions. You want to start listening right where you left, in a given sound file. This is not of importance when listening to music.
  5. When listening to audiobooks, you don't want to be able to activate shuffled playing order. If you, by accident, activated this feature, your experience would become a complete mess and the player would instantly become completely useless to you.
  6. When you want to play an audiobook, and some of your audiobooks happened to be divided into several files, you would prefer to have your audiobook player simply abstract away the fact that your audiobooks are inconveniently split up. You would want your player to just show you one entry per book. Not an entry per file.

  Now I have some questions for the team behind Noise:

  * Is Noise targeted to play only music, or both music and audiobooks?
  * If Noise is only for music, will Noise actively filter away audiobooks from being listed? (you should, IMO).
  * If Noise is intended for both, have you considered splitting Noise into two applications, so as to avoid having to create an overly complicated user interface to account for the two rather different use cases?

Regards
Jon Loldrup.

ps. This was first filed as a bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/noise/+bug/1089456). Corentin Noel made the following comment on that bug report:

"Thanks for your suggestion, his place is for sure on the Bluesprint
section.

Now let's talk about your suggestion. I assume you are talking about audiobooks instead of ebooks.
This could be for sure be included in a plugin. (I think that the Album view is appropriate and that if an audiobook is split in several part, it's because there are chapiters).
But I also think that it needs designers input."