Playlist Navigation

Is there a way to advance to the next playlist (folder) without having to go back to the beginning of all playlists? Like on a CD changer, you have disc + & - and track + & -. On the Rio Car player, all you have is the track + & -. Is there a way to set up a button to take you to the next playlist?

Not strictly, no. Once you've selected some music, the car player doesn't know which playlist it originally came from. Thus, it can have no concept of next/previous playlist.

However, if you're running v2.0beta, you _can_ navigate to the last selected item in the menu. This will allow you to jump to the playlist you last selected, so you can get to the next/previous one relatively easily.

To do it:

1. Press down once to get to the menu. "Playlists" will be selected.
2. Hold the down button. It will jump to the last item you selected.

Thats exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much!

OK, well, not exactly, but sort of.

This requires six button presses, including one long one. This could be very hazardous while driving. I want a single button press to play the next playlist.

Also, it seems odd that the player stops playing at the end of each playlist, instead of continuing with the next one. Does a CD changer stop playing at the end of each CD? Of course not - that would make the whole thing useless.

It seems that the only way for this to play continuously is to play the entire contents of the drive as one playlist, which makes it impossible to go from one artist to the next without forwarding past each song. If you happen to be listening to the Beatles at the moment, you're doomed.

I don't want the player to stop playing until I turn it off, and I want to be able to go to the next artist with a single button press, otherwise this thing is pretty much useless to me.

I know that sounds harsh, but I'm talking about something that CD changers have done for years, and is only a result of the way the unit is programmed.

I did try programming a macro to accomplish this, but it only works sometimes. Not a good thing when you're driving in the Rockies or in New York City!

This is my macro, using the tuner button on the remote:

[ir_translate]
tuner=pause,bottom,bottom.L,top,right,bottom,bottom

The problem is that the time the bottom.L is held for may or may not be long enough for the player to come up with the last playlist selected, in which case the macro proceeds to put the unit into random mode instead.

I am hoping that there is a solution to this problem - maybe I'm missing something.

I am totally amazed with this stereo in every other regard. The story of Hugo deciding to design his own stereo is amazing, and one that will play anything you could ever want to listen to at a moments notice even more amazing. But it shouldn't stop playing until it's done!

Sorry for being long winded, but this is very important to me.

Thanks for your time and help - and thank you Hugo, Empeg, Rio, Mark, Tony, etc... - fine job!

Nice macro. Good idea. =]

You can try adding some "null" buttons (or even null.L) to the middle of the macro sequence to pace things out some more..

I agree (to a certain extent -- I don't think I'd be quite as harsh).

IMHO, a lot of the issues people have would be solved if the player remembered the original playlists that were added to the playing order, so that the playing order would have a list of songs and other lists, which could contain the same. I don't know if that sort of recursion was deemed too resource-consuming or if it was a design choice, but if it remembered that you had added the entire Beatles catalog, it would be much easier to skip from ``Meet the Beatles'' to ``Abbey Road''.

Of course, that could conceivably play havoc with shuffles if not handled properly, and it is a big deal, but it's something that I would definitely like to see in the post-2.0 world.

Well, the null spacing didn't work, because the problem seems to be that the bottom button needs to be held longer than the bottom.L command waits. It only works about half the time.

The best I could come up with is to have a long press send a macro to take the unit back out of shuffle mode, then try again. Not an optimal solution, but much better - almost excellent.

[ir_translate]
tuner.L=bottom,right,bottom,bottom ;take player back out of shuffle
tuner=bottom,bottom.L,top,right,bottom,bottom ;advance to next playlist

I don't understand why the unit is programmed to quit playing at the end of each folder/playlist, even though there may be a months worth of music left waiting to be played. It should just keep playing indefinitely, untill you tell it to stop.

It should be possible to quickly and easily navigate through the music on the player without even looking at the display. So far, I find it to be very frustrating, and unsafe while driving. What do you folks do on those roads where there is no speed limit? You can't exactly look down at the player for 10 seconds while your getting your moneys worth out of your Jaguar, just to play the next song on your stereo.

I'm sorry to sound like I'm complaining, I just want to listen to some Rock 'n Roll! This is an amazing unit - having your entire music collection at your fingertips in your car is mindblowing. I just think it could be a little easier to use.

I don't understand why the unit is programmed to quit playing at the end of each folder/playlist, even though there may be a months worth of music left waiting to be played. It should just keep playing indefinitely, untill you tell it to stop.

It DOES do that. It does PRECISELY that. All you need to do is press the bottom button on the faceplate ("down") three times.

That's all. Down down down. Then the player will play everything and it won't stop. That's the way it's meant to be played. Give it a try.

Tony, to be perfectly frank, I'm tired of you telling us that the way you use your player is the way it's meant to be used. One of the main features of the empeg is that it's very versatile, and you seem to be ignoring that all the time these days. I personally (most of the time) want to listen to my music as I dictate, not in a random order. I can come up with many times where I might want to skip to the nexl album/playlist, but you keep arguing that I should never want to do that. It's infuriating.

Please, feel free to suggest your way (or new ways) to use the player. But stop trying to convince us that your way is the ``right'' way.

``Doctor, it hurts when I do this!''
``Don't do that!''

Bitt, you are correct that the player software is versitile and that fact is brought up less frequently than it could be. However, in Tony's defense, I think he was refering to a feature that was designed into the player and how it was designed to work. Similar to how one couldn't argue with the fact that the rotary knob is MEANT to be rotated to change volume yet is versitile enough to do many other things. Certain features and time savers were designed into the player and I think it would be fair to assume that Tony watched much of its developement as a member of this board and is simply reiterating what he saw develope from the days of the pre 1.00 betas.

I guess what I'm saying is that if that's the way it's meant to be played, then why did they bother with letting us have and select playlists at all?

My problem is that Tony is trying to answer a question about how to do something by telling the asker not to do it. Hardly helpful.

Which is not to say that Tony's not immensely helpful the vast majority of the time, but it's really starting to get on my nerves that any query or suggestion about how actually playing the songs that one wants to hear is met not only with ``try it this other way'', which would be fine, but with the apparent statement of ``you don't want to do it that way'', which is asinine because, if he didn't, he wouldn't have asked.

I was responding to his specific comment that the player would stop playing at the end of a playlist, and his desire to have the player play his entire collection. I was showing him how to have the player play his entire collection without stopping.

I was not attempting to say that a "next playlist" feature is undesirable. I think this would be a neat feature if it could be implemented. I was simply responding to the single specific comment that I quoted in orange above my reply.

Maybe I am misunderstanding this, but I thought that the question to which Tony replied was "how do I make it not stop playing once it reaches the end of a current playlist?" Tony's answer (as I interpretted it) was that playing the root playlist will allow the player to essentially play playlist after playlist without stopping. This doesn't fix the original problem of not being able to switch to the next playlist, but it does get around the problem of having the player stop. He wasn't telling the person to enable shuffle and hit down 3 times.

EDIT: Tony and I were typing at the same time - he just clarified.

Fair enough. Maybe I've misinterpreted more than once, as this isn't something that came upon me all of a sudden with this one post. If so, I sincerely apologize. I just don't one person's bias to hold more credit than it should simply becuse he is so helpful in so many other areas.

Maybe I've misinterpreted more than once, as this isn't something that came upon me all of a sudden with this one post.

No, you haven't misinterpreted me. There are many times when I have specifically said, "Don't do it that way, do it my way instead." So your point is valid.

My purpose for those posts is to defend the player's design. Not to say that someone is wrong for wanting it to work differently, I'm merely saying that it was meant to work a certain way. It may be very flexible, but it's only flexible within its design constraints.

If they kept adding features every time somone wanted it to work differently, the player software would be a complete mess. Any mature UI design is a careful balance that falls somwhere in between the two extremes of the designer's original intent and user's wildest pie-in-the-sky expectations. My purpose is to try to steer new users toward the "designer intent" side of the equation.

Actually we set out to design a toaster, that's feature creep for you.

Rob

And a damn fine toaster it is.

Shaking the crumbs out of the case is problematic, but I can live with that.

What he's really asking for, is something I would crave as well: dispense entirely with the "replace playlist" feature (the default, damnit!), and have the player *always* do insert or append when selecting a playlist from the menus. That way, once the selected playlist finishes, the player picks up where it left off.

Or, alternatively, have the player just continue with the next playlist in the database when the "current" playlist "ends".

Yes, a lot of the time the existing software has no concept of "next playlist", but it should have!

I suppose we could have have Hijack look for "End Of PlayList" and then do something sensible about it..

Cheers

Mark, to be perfectly frank, I'm tired of you telling us the way that you want to use your player is the way it's meant to be used. One of the main features of the empeg is that it's perfect, and you seem to be ignoring that all the time these days. I personally (most of the time) want my music to be followed by hours of silence, not by another playlist. I can come up with many times where I might want to enjoy silent meditation, but you keep arguing that I should never want to do that. It's infuriating.

Rob

Well, there you have it Tony.. we've been told (by two different people).

Cheers

ROFL

LOL... that didn't go where i expected it too.... =D

Pfftph.

> Yes, a lot of the time the existing software has no concept of "next playlist", but it should have!

No, it shouldn't.

The way the player works now is meaningful and clear, at this regard.

If I decide I want to listen to Pink Floyd playlist, it means that I want to listen to Pink Floyd playlist. Period. I does not mean I want to listen to Pink Floyd AND something else, whatever that something esle may be.

If I decide I want to listen to Pink Floyd playlist and something else, I'll select Pink Floyd Playlist and something else. It's easy to do also while driving.

I do prefer that the player stops rather than it continues with something I may not want or like or feel like listening to, since THAT is disturbing much more than unwanted silence, which you can easily turn into music in one click. If you happen to listen to something you did not want to, your mood gets changed, the atmosphere gets changed, it is frustrating, and annoying, and there is little you can do at that point.

Inserting rather than replacing: Definitely good as is now, too. If you want to CUE something after what you are currently listening, then you most likely have time and you can afford a long press. If you want to replace what you're currently listeing to, it means you want to change NOW, you don't care about waiting the song end, so a simple click is faster and way better.

So, I agree with Rob.

Empeg behavior should stay as is, since empeg is NOT a cd changer and that's one of its strenghts. The way empeg works now is more elegant, refined, respectful of the user than what you are proposing. I do not want a machine that goes in an endless loop, unless when I want it to do so, on specific occasions.

HiJack option: great idea. All OPTIONS, being such, are great ideas: they add extra features without compromising the old ones, and I have really nothing against a feature I will never use

Maybe I misunderstood this too, but what I propose is not that it automatically play things that you did not select, but, rather, that if you select multiple playlists to play that it remember that it was in playlists and keep that organization, rather than flattening it out to one large list. That would make it easier to listen to all of your Pink Floyd albums in a row, but decide that you don't want to listen to Dark Side of the Moon right now, and skip over it to listen to Wish You Were Here without having to remember that DSotM contains ten tracks, and then pressing the FF button that many times.

What Bitt wrote makes perfect sense to me and would make for a very powerful addition to the empeg's feature set. It would enable more varied control over the way we play music. And the way I see it, things that go into the player should be about enabling, not "forcing."

I know that if I queue up a few "albums" (actually playlists), I find it a pain in the arse that the player software no longer has any concept of them (all tracks from those selected lists now belong to the new playing dynamic list). This is a fundamental principle of the current operation, so I don't imagine it's an easy change or upgrade.

Bitt, why don't you add a wish item for this, since you've done a nice job of describing one of its primary purposes.

Bruno

If no one can tell me that this is already listed as a wish (is there an internal list akin to the internal bug list for feature requests?) I will do so.

I've never done it before because it seems obvious to me, and I assumed that it would already be on there.

Yeah, you guys get the idea! Obviously it should be optional, so if you wanted to listen to one album, say when you're falling asleep, it would end after it's done, but also be able to have it keep playing continuously through several short playlists without stopping, and also be able to skip to the next playlist easily.

Mark hit it right on the head - if Hijack could determine when the end of playlist occurs and start playing the next one, as an optional feature, that would be peachy! My only problem is that I haven't done any programming since BASIC - I wouldn't quite know where to begin. That's why I was hoping somebody else would know what to do. I hate to be a nuisance, but I appreciate all your help!

wfaulk, I was making a comment on Mark's post, I apologise if I was not clear in that.

At to your specific request, that is keeping the player aware of "playlists" in several occasions, and have fuctions operating on them as a whole (next playlist, skip playlist, etc), well I totally agree and actually the thread of few days ago concerning the concept of "album" that I also was supporting was in the end exactly about that.

Still, in my reply to Mark, I was pointing out someting different, (in reply to what Mark said): I do not want the player to do anything when it reaches the end of playlists, since it is the end of playlists. If I wanted to, I would have done so that that is not the end of the playlists And in this I totally agree with Tony. If you want your player to play endlessly, there are easy ways to do it already now.
And I do not want to change the insert/replace behavior for the reasons I said in my other posts.
These both are things that you were not proposing at all, if I am not mistaken. If I am, sorry about that, but at least I hope it is clear what I meant, now

>wfaulk, I was making a comment on Mark's post,
>I apologise if I was not clear in that.

>At to your specific request, that is keeping the player aware of
>"playlists" in several occasions, and have fuctions operating
>on them as a whole (next playlist, skip playlist, etc),
>well I totally agree

Oddly enough, that's exactly the point of mine that you quoted and then proceeded to trash in a very non-sympathetic fashion.

Make up your mind.

I am happy you found it non-sympathetic, since I just on purpose used the same (non-sympathetic) fashion you used in your post. Maybe then we agree on what is sympathetic and what is not!

However, going back on topic, I though your point was (quoting you):

dispense entirely with the "replace playlist" feature (the default, damnit!), and have the player *always* do insert or append when selecting a playlist from the menus. [...] Or, alternatively, have the player just continue with the next playlist in the database when the "current" playlist "ends".

Which is what I extensively commented on. If that was not your point, then you should make up your mind (and maybe be sympathetic? ) .

That's not the part you originally quoted, dork.

Cheers

Dork?!? Mark! This is hilarious! You've got a personality problem, I'm telling you! Listen you have to get used to criticism otherwise it's gonna get too easy and funny to drive you mad!

So, I see, your "next playlist concept" is NOT what you explained later in your message, but what I said commenting on it. Ok. So, let me suggest you to improve your English a little bit. Well, I admit I should really shut up on this, my English is really bad too, and I had to look on the dictionary what "dork" means.

Well, this is hilarious and also totally pathetic. My excuses to everybody for the way this thread degenerated. That was not in my intentions, at all. So, I think I'll stop here and avoid that Mark freaks out eben more and shuts down Hijack's website again, ok? No panic! ;D

= Dork =

Er...

Now that's funny!

By the way.. for the British-impaired, Rob's posting (way back) was not completely serious..

Cheers

Well, we English-impaired know that. It is the serious part that you did not get, it seems, so again welcome to our club! Oops, I said I would stop! Sorry again everybody!

Sorry Tony, what does ROFL mean?
It would be great if us&uk people can sometimes put some explanations about their slang or too technical english/american terms, cos guys like me doesn't understand all words of your beautiful language ;-)

In reply to:

---

...to listen to all of your Pink Floyd albums in a row, but decide that you don't want to listen to Dark Side of the Moon right now, and skip over it to listen to Wish You Were Here without having to remember that DSotM contains ten tracks, and then pressing the FF button that many times.

---

I know the above is just an example, Bitt, but the way I deal with that is quick and easy - a long press of "3" on the remote removes the whole album from the playlist and continues playing from the start of the next. Though I still can't understand why you'd want to miss out DSotM...

ROFL is short for "Rolling on floor, laughing."

It's not US or UK specific slang. It's internet shorthand, and is in very common usage, like the emoticons :-) ;-) :-O etc.

So when you press down, down, down, it plays the whole entire database you set in emplode, so from there it knows which playlist is next and where it is. Is that right? When I press down, down, down, it starts playing 1 of 12,000+. What if I want to jump to song 6000, but then want to continue through the rest of the songs from there. Is the only way to do it to press Right 5999 times in a row? I think as a former NEO user, this feature would be great to navigate/jump to another song within a playlist.

Out of curiosity, did your dictionary claim that a dork was a stupid or annoying person, or did it claim that it was a whale's penis?

I think the latter would be phrased as a big dork.

ROFL

I thought it wa camels penis.

Actually, by definition, it just means a penis, but it seems to be used without derogatory connotation in the field of veterinary biology. I've heard it used most often in reference to whales, but there's no reason it couldn't be used about camels, too. (I'm not really sure what to call the segment of biology that deals with larger animals, so I defaulted to ``veterinary'', which is not quite accurate. Anyone have a better term for me?)

Actually, the real shorthand is ROTFL. ROFL is just basterdizing the internet-speak I grew up with. Time to RTFM. Or maybe the slang is now RFM...

Bruno

IMNSHO

My favorite is ROTFLMAOASTC.

(Rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off and scaring the cat.)

My dictionary agrees. It means both "stupid" and "penis", without any specific reference to whales or other animals. But I was using an Italian-Eglish dictionary. On a simple English dictionary I am sure I would find a more detailed definition of "dork", probably confirming what you said

See, on the empeg bbs you really leard new things every day...

ok, kind of LOL^2. tnx.

is there an dictionary of those finger-saver terms somewhere?

http://www.acronymfinder.com/ is pretty good for looking up one you don't recognize...

/Michael

I know the above [about listening to all Pink Floyd albums but skiping ove one or two] is just an example, Bitt, but the way I deal with that is quick and easy - a long press of "3" on the remote removes the whole album from the playlist and continues playing from the start of the next. Though I still can't understand why you'd want to miss out DSotM...

While I usually listen to my empeg in Tony the FAQmaster's fashion (or, if I want to listen to something specific, well, I select something specific), I also employ the 'hate' feature here and there, mostly in the 'Pink Floyd' situation described above.

However, how about a little addition to player software which I think would come halfway to Bitt desires without excessive rewriting: keep in running order boundaries of 'batches' of added groups of tunes (ideally, if a playlist was added, also boundaries of child playlists) - obviously, also provide a way to skip to next/previous boundary mark. That way one could decide one want to listen to Roger Water's solo albums, appent Pink Floyd ones, and then skip over Animals.

What do you think?

I was thinking about something very, very, similar. It would do almost exactly what I want. (Maybe exactly -- I'm too lazy right now to actually think it all the way through. )

The only issue I can think of right off of the top of my head is when you insert something in the middle of a playlist, so that an initial group is split in two. I think the best thing would be to keep track of where the ends of playlists are (the same thing as a boundary, really), and the command would be something like ``skip to end of current playlist''.

There's always the (existing) "Source" (Album) field in the track info.. (/proc/empeg_notify).

I don't follow....

Maybe I misunderstood this too, but what I propose is not that it automatically play things that you did not select, but, rather, that if you select multiple playlists to play that it remember that it was in playlists and keep that organization, rather than flattening it out to one large list.

This is actually not terribly hard to implement (post-2.0). The difficult bit, as usual with these things, is finding a button to put the function on.

Or, as tms13 says, you can blat-by-source using the 3 button on the remote, which does TRT if all your playlists are different albums.

Peter

>I don't follow....

Neither does the player , but one could write some code to optionally treat the "source" field as the "Album", so that an "album skip" function could just jog through the running playlist until it finds a FID who's "Source" field is different from the currenly playing FID's "Source" field.

Cheers

Oh, I see. But that doesn't take care of playlists that have multiple sources. It's also not something that we could implement, I don't think.

This is actually not terribly hard to implement (post-2.0).

Woo-hoo! An ancillary request would be to also display some sort of indication of the current playlist, not necessarily by name. An offset would be fine.

The difficult bit, as usual with these things, is finding a button to put the function on.

I agree. Even if you can't come up with a good button for general use, making the command available to Hijack would probably help the majority of us that are interested in such a feature.

Indeed!

Hey, wouldn't it be easier to just extend the timing of the button.L to allow enough time for the last selected playlist to appear? This would make my macro work more consistantly. The timing is just shorter than it should be. Would this be possible, Mark?

Even if you can't come up with a good button for general use, making the command available to Hijack would probably help the majority of us that are interested in such a feature.

So what button would you put it on in Hijack? Unless I missed a Hijack release that adds extra hardware buttons, we're probably nearly as capable as mlord of adding functionality to the player software...

Peter

Maybe it's about time we all started using Prontos!

When is the player software going to implement telepathic searches? I'm getting sick of having to go to search and enter at a minimum 2-3 characters to play any song I want. It would be much easier if I could just think it. I've been waiting for this feature since beta 7! If this thing doesn't become a little more convenient than I'm going to have to trash it and just listen to the songs in my head.

When is the player software going to implement telepathic searches?

Already wishlisted. Gonna have to get a little more creative than that.

Well, each of us could replace the function of a button (or two) that he seldom uses with the new jump feature using Hijack. But that ne'er-used button would be different for each of us, so I didn't want to suggest anything that could be replaced.

...and just listen to the songs in my head.

No, no, don't do that -- otherwise, how could you listen to the voices?

tanstaafl.

>So what button would you put it on in Hijack?

Too easy: PopUp0 or PopUp1

-ml