Audacious - OLD, PLEASE USE GITHUB DISCUSSIONS/ISSUES

Try middle-clicking to change the song position. We used to have a hack that made turned any click into a middle-click, but it broke things with GTK+ 3.5, so we got rid of it.

I haven't update since the downgrade, but before doing this, I would like to ask if this behavior cannot be changed. I mean, users have been accustomed all the time to left click for most things and changing time position in a song (in the time progress bar) is one of them. No media player works in a different way, so it would be a shame if for these things we have to click in the wheel, which is very uncomfortable. I haven't tested this in the beta version, but hopefully in the definitive version this could work like before. :)

Thanks

The GTK+ developers have changed the behavior of GtkSlider to behave as you want it to (left-click to set the position) in GTK+ 3.5.

Ah, I see. In other words (to understand better): In previous versions of GTK the behavior was "incorrect"; so, you used to have a hack to make Audacious work as desired. But in order to avoid problems with GTK 3.5+, you have eliminated this hack thinking that when people get GTK+ 3.5, things will work correctly. Is that right?

What happens is that in the current version of Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), the current version of GTK is 3.4 and we don't know when will the newest version is going to appear in the official repository.

I have checked the GTK+ page (http://www.gtk.org/download/linux.php) and 3.4 is the latest stable release, so official repositories (specially in Ubuntu LTS) probably won't change GTK+ until GTK+ 3.6. The only option would be that the changes in the behavior of GtkSlider you described could happen in some update of GTK 3.4. If not, we have the same problem that was described in this forum with FFMPEG that you were using the latest development version 0.9 when Linux distros have an outdated version 0.7 or 0.8. In that case, it was agreed to have an intermediate solution for people with the older version which is almost everyone, actually

Perhaps, the same thing could be thought with respect to GTK behavior; otherwise, when Audacious 3.3 will be released and these problems with mouse clicking affects most users, people would think that the program is buggy, which is not the case, but I know that because I use it everyday and I visit this page frequenly, etc ... I'm an Audacious fan :).

In this case, when I experienced those problems, it never crossed my mind that I could click with the wheel (middle button), because this doesn't happen in other players, so I went to the point to reinstall an older version and be relatively happy. Less knowledgeable users could be less tolerant :)

Thanks for your attention.

Pascual Lucero wrote:

Otherwise, when Audacious 3.3 will be released and these problems with mouse clicking affects most users, people would think that the program is buggy, which is not the case.

Audacious 3.2.4 does not include the hack anymore either so it is already affecting some users.

This all could be solved with a simple GTK version check but John is against it which is obviously just wrong in this case.
Audacious' behaviour should not be dependent on the used GTK+ version.
And if it was the same for years and all other players use also left-clicks, it should simply not be changed.

@John: What do you recommend if your mouse does not contain a wheel? Have you already though about that? ;)
By the way, how is Michał thinking about this?

The hack was borrowed (not by me) from Rhythmbox. So whoever added that hack to Rhythmbox, and whoever copied it to Audacious, are to blame, in my judgment. Hiding problems rather than fixing them at their source (GTK+ in this case) is almost always a bad idea. If people had reported the problem to GTK+ when they first noticed it instead of hacking around it, GTK+ would have been fixed long ago and this whole mess would have been avoided.

Pascual: People quite often think Audacious is buggy because of bugs in the libraries it depends on. Nothing new there. :)

Thomas: You can tell me "It's wrong" until you're blue in the face without changing my mind on this one. I think it is better in the long run to choose correctness in the code rather than hacking it up to make the user experience better for the moment.

Anyway, the beauty of open source is that you don't have to agree with me here. If you want to patch your own copy, or even convince WebUpd8 to patch theirs, no one is stopping you. Here is the commit you would need to revert: https://github.com/audacious-media-player/audacious-plugins/commit/1957913f4857df0845ae7e15dadc93e38c248a0e

Thomas Lange wrote:

Audacious' behaviour should not be dependent on the used GTK+ version.

One last comment and then I will hold my peace. The behavior of almost every GTK+ program is dependent on the GTK+ version in use. Audacious has been that way for years. We still have little features here and there that don't work if you use a version of GTK+ that is too old. (This is less the case in 3.3 than 3.2, thankfully, now that we require GTK+ 3.)

Dear John,

Thanks for the explanations; as I stated earlier, I am an Audacious fan :)

Now, questions:

For 3.3: I would like to ask if there is a way to get GTK+ 3.5 and use it easily into Ubuntu. As I told you before, the latest stable release is 3.4, so it would take a while to get 3.5 in the main repositories. Installing available .deb files breaks lots of dependencies, so the only way to use it with Audacious is by compiling the source (and also, this implies we should use Audacious by compiling the source too). But, I don't know if this can be done in usr/local without creating conflicts with the main gtk packages necessary for the remaining applications. (As you can see, it is quite difficult to accomodate things use the newest Audacious in the desired way)

For 3.2: In this case, you said: "We will continue to maintain Audacious 3.2.x as a legacy branch for GTK+ 2.x users". So, this is a version where the hack (or a better alternative) should still exist, because these are the users who won't have GTK+ 3.x for a while. Otherwise, they will be forced to use Audacious in a different way compared to any other media player when it wasn't their fault.

Thanks for your attention

John Lindgren wrote:

One last comment and then I will hold my peace.

Sorry for insisting in this topic; In my case, I have no intentions to cause inconveniences. Unfortunately, I am not a programmer to contribute in a more constructive way, so I try to help as much as possible testing the product.

Another related problem with forcing users to use the middle click for such things is experienced in a Laptop, when using the touchpad. Actually, none of the applications I have installed in my computer requires this behavior so I don't know if there is a more optimal solution to this problem. As you see, arriving and using GTK+ 3.5 is not easy at the moment. Of course, users like me are aware that we might ask too much, because Audacious developers might not have too much time for such demanding work. But we are talking about a basic feature that affects both versions of Audacious (3.3 and the legacy 3.2).

Thanks again for your attention. Right now, I upgraded again to 3.3beta1 and I am trying to get used to the middle click. With the exception of this issue, Audacious keeps getting better

Maybe I should mention (in case it's not obvious) that you can still left-click and drag the song slider if your mouse doesn't have a middle button. Also, pressing both buttons at once on a touchpad is often interpreted as a middle-click (or at least, that's the way it is on my laptop).

I've added a patch that reverts this to the Audacious 3.3.1 package in the main WebUpd8 PPA: https://launchpad.net/~nilarimogard/+archive/webupd8