Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Banshee Metrics

Last Wednesday we released Banshee 1.5.4, which included an opt-in feature to submit anonymous usage data. Over 500 people have already opted-in!

Interesting Stats
They are primarily getting Banshee through the Ubuntu PPA, with a moderate number building from source or using other distributions — including 20 OS X users.
383Ubuntu
33source-tarball
27openSUSE/SLED
22git-checkout
20OS X
16Gentoo

They are using Banshee in 36 locales, across 30 languages. Keep in mind the Preference to opt-in is (so far) only translated into 9 languages.
223en-US
51en-GB
41de-DE
35unknown
21ru-RU
18it-IT
14fr-FR
12en-CA
11en-AU
11es-ES
9pl-PL
8pt-BR
6es-CL
5es-MX
5nl-NL
5sv-SE
About half have the Banshee window maximized, enable ReplayGain support, show the bottom-left cover art, and show the context pane.

I'm still working on better ways to analyze the data and extract actionable information. I plan to have distribution graphs and such soon. In the meantime, I've posted some more stats here. As we get more submissions, add more data points, and get better analysis, we will be able to identify options nobody uses and optimize Banshee for real-world users.

15 comments:

  1. Very cool! I was wondering what the (early) results would be. I'm glad to see so many people have already opted to submit information. It's interesting to see that so many of the stats are split nearly 50/50; I guess I assumed that everyone uses Banshee exactly the way I do. ;)

    This information collection isn't a one-time thing, right? How does recollection work? How often does it scan for changes a user makes (maybe they discovered ReplayGain, maybe they were just setting Banshee up when collection happened, and their library jumped from 100 songs to 5000 songs, etc). Does Banshee recognize a non-unique user and update their information?

    Also, any word on ignoring information that is collected while Banshee is run with special options (--debug, especially) since Banshee might be used in non-typical ways then?

    All around, this seems like a very cool thing; thanks for keeping us updated!

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  2. Hey Michael,

    The collection/submission is ongoing as long as you are opted-in. It collects most data when Banshee starts, but it listens for a few events and records them, too - like when you change sources. It submits the data at most every 48 hours.

    We can definitely filter out certain users - based on whether they passed --debug, or built from git. We have all the data, the difficulty is just in analyzing and presenting it.

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  3. How do you decide if it's a new user? I Like the idea of opt-in Userstats. And as we see, some user found it.

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  4. @think: Each user has a GUID. It's not personally identifiable, and lets us track how their usage changes over time.

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  5. The reason why so many people are not using the equaliser is because Ubuntu compiles Banshee with the --disable-builtin-equalizer flag; this was done because the equaliser of GStreamer was deemed to be good enough.

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  6. Ubuntu : 3.25 as many installs as all other platforms and methods combined :D

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  7. Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl8:06 PM, March 03, 2010

    I'm using ArchLinux and I've activated this feature.
    I don't see any ArchLinux here, so I guess they are counted as source-tarball - are they ?

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  8. @Sense: I don't think that's it. If the built-in equalizer is disabled b/c the system one is good enough, the View -> Equalizer option in Banshee should still be there.

    @Hybrid: It's there, I just cut off that list - see https://banshee-project.org/~gburt/banshee-usage-stats.txt for the full one

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  9. I'm responsible for one of the whopping 4 users from Foresight Linux. :)

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  10. Gah, no PPA for Lucid! How am I supposed to use it :/

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  11. @Lukasz: For Lucid, Banshee is in universe, so no PPA is needed. It might take a little bit longer, but 1.5.4 will be available.

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  12. Banshee _is_ built with the "--disable-builtin-equalizer" flag. I'm not sure if that just disables the plugin or makes sure it doesn't get built at all, but Ubuntu does use that flag.

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  13. Sense: Sorry, I wasn't clear - I think I realize where the misunderstanding was now. "--disable-builtin-equalizer" tells Banshee to use the system-install GStreamer equalizer element - it doesn't disable Banshee's equalizer - it only affects whether we use the system Gst plugin or our own, bundled one.

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  14. I'm waiting desperately for banshee on windows!

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  15. It is great to see this progress of this little idea. I hope it will result into some real measurable improvements to Banshee. At the very least it is wonderful to see the dedicated Banshee community rally around this opt in totally passive method of contribution.

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