Bugzilla – Bug 5670
No stop button in new default skin
Last modified: 2011-11-06 23:24:09 UTC
Is it intentional that there is no stop button in the default skin? I can pause, but often want to stop the track. Nb. I have a connectivity problem whereby my SB3 will occasionally stop playing a track. The server still thinks it is playing, so the skin shows the track as playing; the time progress will count up to 0:04 and then reset back to 0:00 repeatedly. When this happens I have to issue a stop command and then play to resume any kind of playback - pause will not get out of the state.
Yes, that's intentional. You could also use the power button or REW to achieve the same result. Or fix your network ;-).
I wish I could fix my network. I think there's actually a problem with a firmware incompatibility with the SB3. The power button is configured to resume from last playback position, so that can't be used as a stop function. Stop seems to be a big ommision to me, that may upset other users. There appears to be space for it (or could make pause button smaller to make more space).
Alan Young wrote: A stop button is required in some circumstance. Stop is different from pause. The most obvious reason is when listening to a radio station. I do not want to pause and then, 30 minutes later for example, unpause and get (until the buffering runs out) old stuff played. There are other occasions when I might want to pause a live station for a few seconds. And in any case, SC cannot always tell the difference between a live stream and other remote-stream types, such as a podcast or BBC listen-again, where pause is a sensible operation.
I'd prefer not to add another button to the UI, but there may be something we can do here. A couple of ideas: 1. Add press-hold capability to the web UI, like on the player. That could trigger a pop-up menu or even just force a stop after a second. 2. On a remote stream, automatically stop the player after some fixed amount of time. (If the remote side doesn't do it for us.) Say something like 5 minutes. We might want to add a heuristic that does _not_ do this if the stream has fixed length (i.e. don't automatically stop songs from service providers but do for radio stations.) Thoughts?
I'd love to see the return of the stop button. I think it's essential for various reasons. 1. all media players that I can think of have a play button - most users will expect to see one. 2. There is no way to do the equivalent of stop. Pressing Power Off/On may be configured to achieve the same a pause, but that's a sloppy cludge, and my settings have been configured to resume at power on anyway. 3. There's no way to replay the current track, as the play button becomes pause (no play button when a track is playing), Rewind button always takes you to previous track (or last track if you are on the first in the playlist), and you can't stop the track such that play can be pressed to restart the track. Overloading the pause button would be a bit naff, but I can understand the thought process as this matches the remote control. It's not clear to the user that there is a way of invoking stop if it's a long-press of the pause button, and this would require some special javascript code to implement, which isn't good for skinning? If you want to save space on the UI panel, get rid of louder/softer volume buttons - these are much less important, as the volume can be changed directly by clicking on the volume level, and the louder/softer buttons don't work like the up/down volume buttons on the remote (you have to press several times, rather than keep the buttons depressed). Nb. a Mute/Unmute toggle would be more useful here.
Well, the REW button should restart the current track, unless you are already at the beginning of the track. That's a real bug, it should behave the same as the remote and the Controller, both already work this way. Filed as bug 6668. We already have lots of play buttons. One per track in the playlist. (Clicking on the play button on the current track _does_ restart it, which is good.) What we don't have is a dedicated unpause button, the pause button toggles between pause and unpause function (using the pause and play icons). This behavior is very similar to what iTunes does, which seems pretty natural. What we also don't have is a dedicated stop button, which is really only useful for disconnecting to remote servers. I propose that we automatically disconnect from streams that don't have a fixed length (per comment 4).
I do not see what the problem is with a dedicated Stop button. Every piece of audio-playing equipment that I can thing of has one (except SBC and SB remotes :-). Users expect it, even if it is possible to get the same effect under different circumstances using other controls. I would also echo Philip's comment that a mute/unmute would be more useful that the vol-up/vol-down buttons.
Here's another vote for a Stop button in the skin. I don't understand how this was released without one.
Dean doesn't work here any more :)
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