Track missing from the filesystem causes beatbox to fail silently

If failing silently isn't okay, it should definitely be able to fail passively. A lot of times I have BeatBox running on my computer while I'm (for example) washing dishes and having BeatBox stop on a missing track would be really inconvenient.

BeatBox had a file-not-found-dialog in the past and it was was removed with no replacement (I could be wrong here).

A dialog explaining the user that the media was not found would be helpful. I propose the following solution:

If a media file is not found, show an alert (dialog) to the user and skip automatically to the next song in the library. The dialog should be present until the user decides what to do about it. If another missing file is found while the dialog is visible, it'd be added to the list as well. The actions buttons would be:

1) Remove media from BeatBox
2) Try to mount the drive containing the media files (This probably needs to be reworded to something like "Try to find media" for non-technical users)
3) Cancel? Do nothing?

I'm assigning this to Daniel for now, since we need design directions here.

A dialog is too intrusive. There was a very fancy non-intrusive error widget in GTK, I don't remember the name though... Gedit and Postler use it.

Perhaps an infobar saying it wouldn't find the song, then it should attempt
playing the next song on the playlist?

Thanks,
Cassidy James

--
Sent from *elementary OS* <http://elementaryos.org/>.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 8:52 AM, Launchpad Bug Tracker <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel) has assigned this bug to you for
> BeatBox:
>
> A track missing from the filesystem or located on a (possibly internal)
> media that's been disconnected causes BeatBox to not play the song and
> but don't alert the user about the issue. It attempt to mount the medium
> on which the song is located (this can be later merged into Granite or
> even in Glib because it looks like a good idea for other apps too), and
> alert the user in case of other issues.
>
> ** Affects: beat-box
> Importance: Medium
> Assignee: elementary UX Team (elementary-design)
> Status: Confirmed
>
> --
> Track missing from the filesystem causes beatbox to fail silently
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/954014
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of elementary
> UX Team, which is a bug assignee.
>

I agree, a warning infobar seems like a better option.

Yea, I'd go for the info bar and make it something like "BeatBox can't find n song(s)" or whatever.

Yes, BeatBox currently tries to mount a filesystem if it sees that some of the library's music is on that filesystem. It also used to prompt the user saying that the file could not be found with numerous options (rescan, delete file, locate file, do nothing). I am not sure what happened to that.

I think though that an info bar is a good option. It would go like this:

1. Attempt to play song.
2. Show infobar ("1 song could not be found [See List]")
3. Clicking on see list shows a dialog with options to rescan, delete selected file(s), locate selected file, or close
4. Skip to next song
5. Goto 1 and repeat, now infobar will say "2 Songs could not be found"

the only problem with this is if the user's music is on an external mount, and they forgot to mount before opening, it will loop through the whole library and say none could be found.