Improve initial user experience

[lazka]

Original issue 1090 created by nick.boultbee on 2012-12-26T11:49:38.000Z:

Having just tested a fresh installation on Windows, I saw that QL appears unfriendly "out of the box".

This is also the impression a colleague gave me, and only after I'd described some of the more powerful features did he say he'd go back and have another look - i.e. the user interface presentation / defaults had put off even a very technical user.

Some initial ides:

• Increase the default height and width. Screens have got much bigger in ~8 years.
• Make a simpler browser the default (e.g. album list or search): looks cleaner too.
• Add Artist to the column list by default - was quite surprised to not see it there.
• Enable some "core" plugins by default (Album Art, Replay Gain, Browse Folders, MusicBrainz lookup etc)
• Provide better notifications of missing Python modules. On enabling plugins, I found 13 errors due to unavailable modules, despite not wanting most of these plugins anyway. But DBus stands out here particularly.
• Disable *nix-only plugins for Windows.

Probably there are a few others; add here.

[lazka]

Comment #1 originally posted by reiter.christoph on 2012-12-27T11:50:16.000Z:

Some comments:

• Window size: I think I've increased it recently. I'm still on 1366x768 most of the time... :(
• 'simpler browser the default' this was changed because people got confused that after adding songs they didn't show up in the list. This should work now (but still buggy).. so it's OK to switch back.
• default plugins are possible since the plugin rewrite. Just add them to the config. MPRIS should be stable enough now to enable it too.
• I've added a whitelist thing to the plugin exception some time ago (the macos mmkeys one uses it). Feel free to improve it and add to more plugins. It might be easier to special case and hide dbus erros on windows.

+1 to all...

[lazka]

Comment #2 originally posted by nick.boultbee on 2013-10-07T22:37:25.000Z:

Have just reinstalled (on Ubuntu), and re-reminded of this. Got a few fixes lined up.

And another one: prompt use to set up library (see Issue #783 & Issue #388)...

[lazka]

Comment #3 originally posted by nick.boultbee on 2013-10-12T11:31:59.000Z:

In revision 77ac7eb3b689, prompt user for library settings if scan dirs not set up yet.

[declension]

Not sure, but I think there's still some work to do on this.

[CreamyCookie]

Idea from @xhc1: show a popup on first use (or search) about what places it will search in (artist, album, title). Users might expect the search to find songs by their filenames.

[brandonkirsch]

I'm new to Quod Libet and the only thing I didn't like about my initial experience is that the MPRIS D-Bus Support plugin is not enabled by default. This plugin enables multimedia playback controls for my KDE Linux desktop, but it took me a month before I took to Google to find that support is already built-in.

I would suggest turning it on by default for Linux desktop users.