[vlc-devel] libcddb added, playlist interface - disappointing

[R. Bernstein]

I've added CDDB title information in the playlist for libcdio CD-DA
plugin, but there's a big disparity between the information that CDDB
provides and what is shown. Not unlike the situation for VCD via
vcdinfo.

Somewhere between the playlist API and the GUIs, things are a
bit screwy.

Both the wxwindows and gtk GUI show in the playlist window what I
think is a somewhat questionable column called "Author".  The
information CDDB lists for a given track is "Title" and
"Artist". (Deja vu - the issues raised with VCD a long while back
where I suggested the names "Chapter" and "Title" really should be
customizable so that for CD-DA and VCD "Title" could be labeled
"Track" and "Chapter" in a VCD could be labeled "Entry".) But okay
let's call a CDDB "Title" a vlc "name" (or "File" in the GTK GUI) and
a CDDB "Artist" a vlc "Author".

What's weird is that the un"simplified" routine,  playlist_AddExt() 
sets the "Author" field to the null string. And although there is a
parameter in playlist_AddExt called "duration", it doesn't appear in
the wxwindows GUI. It does appear in the GTK GUI, and although the
CD-DA plugin sets the duration value correctly, the GTK GUI doesn't read
this and shows "no info." In other words, no matter which interface you
use no matter how many fields you carefully set, what you'll see in
the playlist is is an extra column that is useless.

Actually that's not completely true, because one could create a
routine similar to playlist_AddExt that takes an "Author" parameter
and uses it to set the "Author" field. But why then have
playlist_AddExt at all?

And where does one show general information about a CD-DA, like the
Title of the CD, Category, Genre, Year and so on? 

Probably what I'll do for the "name" field of the playlist of a CD-DA
is to allow a user to customize this so that one can decide what one
wants to put here. For myself, I'd probably include the CDDB track
number, the title, artist, perhaps duration, and perhaps the title of
the CD since there doesn't seem to be any other place to put it.

Well, perhaps "no other place to put it" is not accurate either. There
is the "infos" array. But again I suspect if someone were to take the
trouble to set that, one would find that too isn't shown. Sigh.

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