mattyv

The Ubuntu One Music store, slated for release with Ubuntu 10.04 just went into public beta. Since I have Lucid running in Virtualbox OSE it seemed like a good thing to test. As the public beta blog entry lists a number of things to test, I decided to look at those specifically.

MP3 codec detection

This copy of Lucid was quite raw, no MP3 codecs.

Easily handled, installation worked seamlessly

Then I hit a hurdle. The main pane in Rhythmbox was blank (white) for quite some time, eventually loading an Ubuntu One Music Store error page, as shown to the right.

Generic error message from Ubuntu One Music Store, within Rhytmbox

This was partially to be expected, as I hadn’t at that point configured or used Ubuntu One on that virtual machine. I tried setting my Ubuntu One preferences via the System menu, however it crashed the first time. The second try opened Firefox and allowed me to login and add the computer. It would have been nice if that could be handled directly through Rhythmbox, given it was quite confusing and only my prior knowledge of the preferences menu allowed it to be overcome quickly. The plugin page within Rhythmbox also provided no options and no clues.

Take two, having paired the virtual computer with Ubuntu One, worked fine and presented me with a home page of music.

We get there in the end

Leaving the store idle for a while seemed to make it non-responsive to commands, however after reloading Rhythmbox I was finally able to take a look around.

Search

Using the search function was quick, and the categories of search should be familiar to those using Rhythmbox eg. Artist, Album etc. Then I headed into Browse mode, again finding it easy and hiccup free. Eighteen genre based categories are available for browsing, which should be quite sufficient.

One track I came across seemed to be a video, so Rhythmbox warned me it was not in MP3 format. I tried to preview it anyway (this is testing, afterall) and naturally it failed. This left me with a blank white screen again. Right-clicking allows you to go back and everything is fine again. However, this might not be clear to a new user. Perhaps some browser-like buttons for the available controls (forward, back, stop, reload) should be introduced to the interface when browsing the Ubuntu One Music Store.

I moved onto browsing newly added items and picked an MP3 release, which had three available tracks. Previewing these was simple and no errors occurred. The previews lasted for 30 seconds, as described in the store help section. One thing that could do with some work on this screen is the indication for the track format. Under the cover art is a red box displaying the format and I presume the bitrate. When hovering over it we get the well-known web browser question mark cursor, but no tooltip. A good addition would be to make hovering display some more information, as one might expect with the cursor.

The tracks had a ‘Download’ option, which I clicked. For some reason this just resulted in an error page saying that downloading was unavailable. This kept happening, and the same page appeared when trying to go to my ‘Basket‘. It was also not clear if clicking on download would add the track to my basket, or start a single download/purchase immediately.

That’s all the testing I could do for now. Nothing would be added to the basket, not that I could pay for them anyway. This was just some beta testing for Ubuntu One :-)
It all looks promising, and certainly the idea of a public beta is to iron out the bugs like those I found. Perhaps my region (Australia) was the cause, but that was not clear at all. As a responsible member of the Ubuntu community, I will be searching for existing bug reports and providing feedback or new bugs where necessary. This was certainly not a rant post. Betas are made for testing, something we could all do with remembering given the past week’s bug spam over button placement.