Bugzilla – Bug 11939
Playing a "new" track should not clear the current "now playing" playlist
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:28:24 UTC
I know this is a "classic" bug that has been talked about for a while, so I spent 20 minutes searching through bugzilla but never found it. Users complain about this a lot, as do many of us. To reiterate the problem: Pressing "play" on a song clears the current "now playing" playlist (even if one of the songs is playing!). Sounds simple enough, but the effect is that many, many times users do not want/expect this behavior. And it is irreversible. Great way to kill a party if I've spent some time building a playlist. A reasonable solution seems to be: If I have a playlist containing songs A and B, and I press "play" on song C, song C gets added to the end of the playlist and song C starts playing. Curious to hear other potential solutions to this (I know "playlist mode" and "party mix" features are related to this for example, so this isn't a new discussion). But the current behavior needs to be changed - it's too nasty.
You wouldn't find the bug because it's been designed this way since probably day one. Certainly as long as I've seen it. the ability to "insert" a song after the currently playing song was a feature that I took part in adding. Even as recently as the newly revamped Default skin, the "insert" feature was an unsupported option (morethanthis=1) in favour of the current play behaviour. The behaviour you are describing has the potential of confusing the behaviour or play, add, and insert. Context-sensitive behaviour is a tricky thing to manage. Perhaps you could change "play" to work like "insert" and create an easy button function for clearing the playlist that isn't quite as specific as being on the "now playing" option of the home menu and pressing "add"
Alternative solution: Still clear the playlist but provide an "undo" feature? Should not be too difficult to do, just save the playlist to a temporary spot before clearing. Rationale: clearing a playlist WITHOUT plain playing a track is hard right now so many people probably don't do it. Yet SC handling of large playlists is also not extremely powerful (slows down a lot of things) and shuffle would probably give unexpected results.
Here are the main thoughts I have on this (and saved playlists) from a recent email, summarized by: Save n number of old recent Playing Now playlists (and make them easily recallable, including cursor position (i.e. on track 5 of 7)): *** The NP playlist can still be permanently destroyed on a simple press of the play button at the wrong time. Solutions: Either a) Ask confirmation from the user when they try to play a new single item when the NP playlist has more than one item in it., or better b) Have the first item under "Playlists" be a new menu "Recent Now Playing" with a submenu showing x number of NP playlists with the last change date as the item title. You could also link to "Recent NP" from the upcoming NP context menu. With this solution, you can quickly handle the "oops, I lost my playlist" problem plus you get a useful new feature of be able to go back in time to play recent playlists. Bonus Item: After you play (i.e. start a new NP playlist) a saved playlist, let call it "Dean's Birthday Mix", when you go into the NP playlist, an item at the bottom (or better a context menu choice) shows "Update Dean Birthday Mix", so that when you add/delete items from that list you can quickly save it back to the playlist that originated the current NP list. Or maybe even optionally have this done automatically. Double Bonus item: Save the cursor position to the recent NP playlist, so when you go replay one that you accidentally replaced, it starts up from where you left off. This same "save the cursor position" feature could be nice for updating the "Dean's Birthday Mix".
Bingo!
Bug 11376 perhaps is related to this concept you are talking about?
For what it's worth, I really like the current functionality whereby what I tell the product to do actually happens. Don't second guess that when the user decides to play a new album, he really meant to insert the album to the end of what is currently playing. Isn't this "bug" covered to death by playlist/party mode? I have that switched off, and that's what I want. Don't force new behaviour on people that don't see the current functionality as a bug. Perhaps you are simply suggesting that playlist mode should be the default? Whatever, as long as I can turn it off and keep it off.
I'm with Philip. I've used Squeezeboxes for years, and I like that I can, for instance, find something I'd like to hear more than the current playlist/track and, as soon as I find it, jettison the old stuff in one step, with no silence between old and new track. I like this and do not consider it a bug at all. Tom, #3: careful with the "last x playlists" idea. My SyncOptions plugin offers the ability to save/restore playlists when a player enters/leaves a sync group. What I've found is that saving a long playlist takes some time. If you auto-save the current playlist, you'll introduce lag, which will be especially noticeable for folks with multiple players (where SC lag means other players' UIs becoming mysteriously unresponsive). Probably also lag before the selected track starts playing, considering that SC is single-threaded. I think a confirmation/disambiguation menu would work better. Tap play, get a menu, the first/selected item of which is "Play this now". Other options could include "Play this next" (insert), "Play this last" (add), etc. Might be nice to have different song/album options ("Play this track now", "Play this album now") KDF, #1: play = insert next has potential for single tracks. Then "replace that with this" becomes a matter of tapping play and then tapping Fwd. Quick and easy. I'm not sure how that would work with "play all songs from this album". If you've played 2 of 3 songs from album A and then tap play on song 3 of 4 from album B, what would your playlist look like? Would you play B3, B4, B1, B2, and then return to A3? I think that return to album A could be weird & jarring.
I was under the impression that a non-distructive play was required for the touch to be "usable". What change?