Writing a freesound plugin for Pitivi

I always say that my first geeky passion is computer programming. But that is a passion I developed about 8 years ago. Another geeky passion I have recently developed has been security analysis. Because of this reason I started a Youtube channel the previous year called “Inversor Moderno” (“Modern investor” in English). Besides the fact that I prefer to follow the fundamental analysis and to be more specific the “value investing” philosophy, I started the channel with the purpose of leaning and teaching more about investments and specifically about quantitative trading. However, it has been a long time since the last time I uploaded a video.

The intro of my videos was made using Blender and Pitivi. The bag of money was made in Blender and the sound of the Wall Street bell was added using Pitivi. All the rest of each video in my channel are made using Pitivi. I consider that the best ideas you may have come up when you really start to eat your own dog food. When I was animating the intro, I remembered that when I started trading, the platform I used notified me with a Wall Street bell sound when a position touched “take profit” or “stop loss”. So I wanted to add a sound like this one to my intro. Then I thought: “It would be nice if Pitivi had a sound library”.

Flashback: I remember I had an introductory course in the university in which students had as an assignment task to develop a video game. Nobody knew how to develop a video game, but the idea was also to research. By that time, I knew something about Blender and the BGE and I could convince to my friends to use Blender. We modeled the university in Blender and then put a human in there with Makehuman. But our game needed sounds. Searching for Creative Commons sounds, I found the Freesound database.

Luckily, not only has an API to access their sound database, but it also has a [Python module](https://github.com/MTG/freesound-python). So I decided to write a plugin that allows to query for some sounds from Pitivi and importing them to the Pitivi Media Library. I made the first step the previous year, but I didn't continue it. This last week, I decided to continue this mini-project. The plugin is working now, but there are some things to complete and a lot more to review. However, you can see a preview here.

I need suggestions about design. I am still not sure if I should use a GtkListBox or if a GtkTreeView would look better. Also I don’t know what message should be shown when no result is found after searching and also what message to show when the Freesound library window is open for the first time.

You can try this feature in my branch (yes, it needs to be rebased).