Some xmms interface/usability and other concerns

This is crossposted from the forum, because I have no real idea whether
the developers see the forum, and because I think these are not so much
'wishlist' items, so much as areas that really merit being addressed.

I checked the faq, the todo list, etc. and to some extent read through
the list archives to see if these issues had been raised.  I very well
could have missed it, but I didn't see them being so brought up.
Apologies for any failings in this regard, and also if this message
is inappropropriate for this list.

So here it is:

My basic premise here is that I would like to see a flexible, comfortable
means for playing music files on Linux. I don't really care if it's a
fancy shellscript that knows which of umpteen million different command
line utilities to call or if it's a whiz-bang skinnable themable 
tutti-fruity eye-candy applet-thing. I use XMMS primarily because the
playlist support is fairly good, and because it's got more plugins 
than there are external players for most sound formats.

So take the rest with a grain of salt, especially if you disagree with 
this viewpoint. All the same, I do think these are reasonble issues to 
address within a gui music player.


   1. Most importantly, some greater indication from the developers if 
xmms is intended to be considered alive and actively developed. If the 
project has lost interest from the developers, I don't feel this 
information has been widely enough broadcast in the open source world. 
A replacement or a renewed interest in the project would be quite nice 
if this is the case, and if not, some additional signs of life 
and/or communication would be good.
   2. Better handling of plugin problems, at least in reporting errors. 
Right now, when I add a plugin that segfaults, I often have no idea 
which piece is at fault. Given how many dang plugins I am using, this 
can become unpleasant. An optional logfile showing what plugins are 
entered perhaps? A gui display? a signal handler for segfault that 
dumps a stack trace? (not sure if this is possible).
   3. Some more sophisticated method of associating files with plugins 
than extensions. Often i ask xmms to play a file with capitalized 
filenames or something like this, and the plugins don't think they 
should play it. I'm not certain whether this is a plugin developer 
error, or an API issue, but the API could be changed or developer 
recommendations could be made clearer.
   4. Relatedly, a user-accessable means of controlling which plugins 
get which files. Sometimes a given plugin will desire to play, for 
example, mp3, ogg, and asf. Perhaps it is the only available plugin 
that plays asf, but it does a lousy job at mp3 and ogg. I have no 
control over which plugin gets which file save enabling/disabling 
them as I go, and/or renaming the plugins to control the 
alpha-ordered test suquence. Both are ugly.
   5. User interface semantics needs updatiing. Several plugins 
are having to overload things like the About dialog or the time 
slider in order to do things like play multiple songs per file 
in formats such as TFMX, NSF, SID, and so on. These hacks are 
not nice, and cause loss of other functionality and confusion. 
A more generalized control set or a means for plugins to cleanly 
offer addtional controls would be helpful.
   6. Poor behavior for large playlists. XMMS likes to "walk" 
the playlist checking each file out with a plugin in some fashion 
before starting to play any files. Sometimes I like to have xmms 
play a random file from my mod collection. I have around 40,000 
files. This can take ~10 minutes of wall clock time with the CPU 
nearly pegged before the first file is played. Also, xmms seems
to fall over more easily with large playlists. Maybe some use 
of externally implemented well-hammered datastructure libraries 
would help?  

[Edit: I recently pointed at xmms at a smaller, 29,551 file subset
of my collection.  After 30 minutes of 99% cputime and no audio output,
I gave up.]

   7. (optional?) Cooperative interface. It would be nice if xmms had 
an option to behave nicely with windowmanagers allowing decorations 
and so forth. Windowmanagers have various behavioral features which 
are usability-focused, many of which do not work with XMMS due to 
its special window behavior. A plain interface which plays nicely 
with others would be appreciated. 


Thanks for your time.

-josh


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