UX – active sound source should be at top

The design spec currently specifies that the media players should be sorted alphabetically by application name[1].

Matthew, what do you think about this suggestion?

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound#Music_player_section

Thibault, thanks for the interesting suggestion. You're right that having the active player at the top would mean consistent movement, and less movement required, to access the playback controls.

However, it would also mean a player could jump around often in the menu. Consider that you have ambient music playing in a music player. Without stopping it, you play a brief video (a sports clip, say, or a news item, or something else that isn't musical) in a browser that integrates with the sound menu. In the sound menu, the browser would jump above the music player, because it's the newest player; then when video ends, it would jump below again, because it's no longer playing.

I'm not sure whether that would outweigh the benefit, and it's hard to tell because 13.10 is the first (and hopefully only) Ubuntu version to show playback controls for multiple players at once. I'll look at this again after 14.04, but in the meantime, contributors are welcome to produce a PPA for testing the behavior you suggest.