"Listen to Music" shortcut loads Totem and not Banshee

This happens because banshee was renamed from 'banshee-1' to 'banshee', but the name was not changed according on Unity's code.

I discovered this error was because the default music player was set to "custom" execute the command "banshee-1" (which was the name of banshee in versions found in the banshee PPA). This setting appears to be preserved on clean install (with a separate /home) so if a user moves from Maverick and -was- using the PPA the command "banshee-1" fails and thus Unity falls back to Totem to provide music playback functionality. Changing the settings in "preferred applications" to custom launch with the command "banshee" or simply selecting it from the list of preferred applications fixes the problem. Though this preserving of an outdated application name/command in "prefered applications" is still a concerning issue I would think.

unity/src/PlacesHomeView.cpp:

  PlacesHomeView::PlacesHomeView ()
  {
    …
    //In case the GConf key is invalid (e.g. when an app was uninstalled), we
    //rely on a fallback "whitelist" mechanism instead of showing nothing at all
    …
    _music_alternatives.push_back("banshee-1");
    _music_alternatives.push_back("rhythmbox");
    _music_alternatives.push_back("totem");
    _music_alternatives.push_back("vlc");
  }

which would be easy enough to fix, however:

  $ gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/applications/media/exec
  banshee-1

shows that this is being populated/saved somewhere and therefore will need some extra code somewhere to migrate that stale value.

/desktop/gnome/applications/media/exec

Banshee people: any idea where:

  gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/applications/media/exec="banshee-1"

is being set?

Iain: groovy!

Do we need to do some migration magic too? If I just manually edit '/usr/share/gconf/defaults/10_libgnome2-common' (from 'libgnome2-common.gconf-defaults') and then run gconf I still get the old value:

  $ grep banshee /usr/share/gconf/defaults/10_libgnome2-common
  /desktop/gnome/applications/media/exec banshee
  $ gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/applications/media/exec
  banshee-1

The wrong default player was reported on bug #729952 (which I'm setting as duplicate of this one now).

This bug was fixed in the package desktop-file-utils - 0.18-0ubuntu2

---------------
desktop-file-utils (0.18-0ubuntu2) natty; urgency=low

  * Set Banshee as the default handler for audio/{dvd,cdda,player}
    mimetypes (LP: #751610)
 -- Iain Lane <email address hidden> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:37:14 +0100

This bug was fixed in the package libgnome - 2.32.1-0ubuntu3

---------------
libgnome (2.32.1-0ubuntu3) natty; urgency=low

  * Banshee's desktop file was renamed from banshee-1 to banshee (LP:
    #751610)
 -- Iain Lane <email address hidden> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:23:53 +0100

I don't know if we can handle the case of users who have manually set the key to banshee-1 themselves: the GConf defaults provide system defaults that users can override if they wish. On my system (which has used the default):

laney@chicken> gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/applications/media/exec
banshee

as per-user GConf settings are stored in the home directory, I don't see how we can fix this for them nicely.

We've pinged upstream for a solution, and one grubby idea I have is for banshee to supply a 'banshee-1.desktop' file with NoDisplay=true that should still work for users that have set banshee-1 as their handler.

The Unity tasks are handled in fact by the other fixes.