Also, one-button-shuffle control is another that I've seen a BUNCH of people request (me included) with no responses.

Well, one-button shuffle is kind of useless at this time since it doesn't do anything useful until you select a new playlist.

There's an interesting debate about shuffle play somewhere on this BBS (I forget where), but there's a sort of pro-and-con thing about shuffle play that was brought up.

As it stands right now, shuffle takes the current playlist then saves a static "shuffled" version of that playlist so that they can traverse it back and forth. This allows them to properly cache the music. But with large playlists, this shuffle operation can be time-intensive, so they only do the shuffling when you select a new playlist.

So what happens when you hit that single-button to activate shuffle play? Because the Empeg has playlists, it's a more complicated question than it is with a CD player. Do you want the unit to stop playing the current song while it reshuffles the playlist? Or do you want it to just re-activate the last shuffled version of that playlist? What if you turn shuffle off? Suppose you turn off shuffle, and it's playing a song that exists in more than one sub-playlist of the current playlist? How does the Empeg know which playlist to continue sequentially?

The thing about those questions is that they all have different answers depending on the user.

My personal preference would be:

- When you activate shuffle, immediately stop playing the current song, reshuffle the current playlist, and begin playing the first song from that shuffled list.

- When you deactivate shuffle, do not stop playing the current song. When the current song is over, play the next song in the current playlist. If the song exists in more than one sub-playlist of the current playlist, test the other "next" songs to see if they are from the same album/artist. If so, pick that one, because it's probably the next song on the album and I turned off shuffle so that I could hear the rest of the album unshuffled.

See, that way, I could shuffle-play the whole unit (the "root" playlist), but when it plays a certain song from a certain album, I could turn off shuffle-play and it would then continue to play the rest of that album.

Notice, though, that that's a complex piece of behavior, and it's only my preference. Someone else would want it to behave differently. Not an easy problem for the programmers to solve, eh?


-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.