Begin forwarded message:
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 12:44:29 -0500 From: Adam Luter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Alexander Leidinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [mp3encoder] Lame genre bug (annoyance). On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 06:43:23PM +0200, Alexander Leidinger wrote: > > I can agree with this line of thinking, but shouldn't you be able to > > turn this off? At the least, if we are in quiet mode, I think it would be > > nice if we could still use a silent default? > > Personally I would say "no". If I want to set a specific genre I want to > know if LAME isn't able to do it and either be able to determine if I > did a mistake (typo) or to choose another genre. > > I not only like to see such behavior from LAME I also want this behavior > in frontends to LAME (in case I use such a tool). This is off course my > personal preference. > > Any tool which fails to notify me of a mistake and silently uses a > default is buggy in my point of view. IMHO it is more surprising to see > mysteriously a different genre than to see an error show up which > notifies me of a wrong genre. And human computer interaction guidelines > agree here with me. > > You may present the user with the possibility to either use a default > value or to choose another genre if LAME moans about it, and you may > provide an option in your program to always use the default genre if > LAME moans, but the preconfigured default (userfriendly) action of a > program should be to meet the expectations of an user, which is in this > case to _not_ use a default genre if the specified genre doesn't work. > Everything else doesn't fit into the common "usability" view. Alexander, I do agree with you, if you can't set a value a program should at the -least- warn you (if not, as you suggest, abort). But if the user has specified the quiet option (or some other option, perhaps 'force'?) then it seems the user wants the least feedback from the program. Which, as it happens, is what my program YaRET wants, because it is a batch program (and user interaction is not really figured into that sort of design). So right now YaRET would have to parse the genre list (gotten from the lame command line option) and match the user specified genre (which is often from the very inaccurate CDDB database). YaRET could then go around lame and set an appropriate default genre, if the user has set an invalid one. Perhaps it can be appreciated (esp. since YaRET supports several encoders) that this isn't the best solution for YaRET. It's not that it's hard to add this functionality (heck YaRET's written in -Perl-), but I would want it abstracted feature. And as an abstracted feature it seems -very- akward. Now of course, I should go back to the rest of the world. In which case lame aborting is the best solution, I agree. But there are probably other front-ends to lame that -would- like to have a similar 'ignore tag errors' option that turns off this abortive behavior; if only to simplify user interaction. But, it is up to you. As it is, I (personally) don't use lame for anything where I care about having the genre set. But as the maintainer of YaRET my opinion is that lame quietly ignoring an invalid genre is a nice feature. Thanks for lis'nin. -Adam Luter -- Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander @ Leidinger.net GPG fingerprint = C518 BC70 E67F 143F BE91 3365 79E2 9C60 B006 3FE7 _______________________________________________ mp3encoder mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/mp3encoder
