Nautilus sound preview... what's the plan ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi gents,

The "official" way of adding sound preview in Nautilus was to install
the package "sox". Well, that's what I gathered when I installed Warty
anyway. Problem is that it didn't work (despite what it said on the
tin), for OGG files. In Hoary, it got worse, no WAV or MP3 (can't
remember which, am writing this from Breezy, can't check...).
Well in Breezy, as of now anyway, with sox, Nautilus won't preview any
audio file : no WAV, no OGG, and no MP3... nothing.

I am not at all complaining of course (this isn't the place...), rather,
I am wondering what you think the best way to fix this would be ?

Given that in the long term, if I understand well, anything to do with
audio/video/multimedia ought to be dealt with using the Gstreamer
framework, I thought it would be technically elegant, logical and
consistent, if Nautilus used some Gstreamer plug-in to preview audio
files ? Something that could read as many "open" formats as possible (at
the very least, WAV and OGG), and for MP3, it could use the "mad"
plug-in, that most people already install in order to get Rhythmbox to
play MP3 songs ?

Are Gnome folks working on this already ? If not, does Ubuntu have the
skills to implement this by itself ? For Breezy ? Breezy+1 ?


Just trying to see where things are heading to (if anywhere...) on this
particular point, as I am little confused and in the dark at present.


Regards,


--
Vince