[emms-help] some notes on EMMS

[Tom Tromey]

I've been playing with EMMS today.  Nice job!  I'm moving more and
more of my desktop into Emacs these days, and EMMS fits nicely.

I have a couple oddities and some feature suggestions.  Let me know
what you think.

* It seems weird that the default playlist buffer name starts with a
  space.  This means it doesn't show up in the buffer menu, etc.
  How about removing that space?

* Maybe just `emms' could be an alias for `emms-playlist-mode-go'?

* emms-playlist-mode should have a 'mode-class setting:

    (put 'emms-playlist-mode 'mode-class 'special)

  See `Major Mode Conventions' in the elisp ref.

* I found the former while looking for a toolbar.  It would be cool if
  emms-playlist-mode set a toolbar with buttons for pause/play/etc.
  Perhaps in conjunction with this there could be a new command to
  show the playlist in a new frame... I disable the toolbar by default
  but if this were in a dedicated frame I would enable it there.  One
  issue is the icons, but Gnome and KDE both seem to have nice ones.

* Initially EMMS was using xine, since apparently that is all I have
  installed.  (I have "aplay" from ALSA, but I don't know if that is
  different from "alsaplay" or if alsaplay is a Debian name, or
  what...?).  Anyway xine insisted on showing a graphical display and
  after digging through the source I found that this is a xine
  limitation, so I installed mplayer.  I don't know what to suggest
  here; maybe this could be mentioned in the manual?

* Should the "UI" functions from emms-volume.el have ";;;###autoload"
  comments?  What about emms-playlist-mode-go?  (This kind of thing is
  nicer for ELPA users, FWIW.  At least IMO.)

* Finally, I wrote some EMMS support code to go with my `status'
  module.  status.el provides an Emacs interface to the Gnome/KDE
  notification area, via a hacked up zenity (the zenity is in Gnome
  bugzilla -- this is all far from ideal; I'd like to get this support
  directly into Emacs instead).

  Anyway, on the off chance that someone wants to go through the
  effort of setting this up, I've attached emms-status.el.  This puts
  a button in the status tray; left-click pauses or plays; the tooltip
  shows the current song; and there is a menu (well, something is
  broken but the code is there :-) letting you access a few other EMMS
  functions.

  I think now 50% of the icons in my status tray are from Emacs :-)

Tom

emms-status.el
Description: emms-status.el