Rockbox Ports are now being developed for various digital audio players!
Canvassing opinion again :-)Having dipped my toe in the development waters with pause-on-timeout and at least successfully scratched my own itch - if no-one elses - I'm thinking about the issue of losing your place in a large / long running file.As usual (selfishly) I'm considering my own situation first: I'm listening to an audio book and fall asleep at some point. With pause-on-timeout bringing the sleep-timer in to play, I don't have problems with the player running all night.But if the timeout happened automatically, the chances are that the track isn't at the place I last remember, and I want to resume from that place.Depending on how long my sleep-timeout was, this could be anything from 5 minutes to 5hrs worth of audio to scan through. The accelerated seeking is excellent, but needs a bit of timing and co-ordination.
So I'm thinking about trying a binary search method which would work as follows:1) If the player shuts down as a result of a sleep-timeout, I (or rather RockBox!) remember this fact and when the player is turned on, it's automatically in "binary-search mode".
2) If I leave the player to play unmolested for a period of time (10 seconds, say, enough to get some context), I'm out of binary-search mode and back to business as usual. And the same thing applies if I pause, play, stop FF or REW, I'm out of binary-search mode.3) If however I press "previous track" within 10 seconds, I'm binary-searching; any "next track" or "previous track" presses from this point seek only within the current track.4) The period I start off with is half the period of the sleep timeout. So for convenience imagine my sleep-timeout is, ahem, 64 minutes. "previous track" jumps back 32 minutes. I now have 10 seconds to decide if this is close enough for me to the point where I want to resume.If I don't act and let it play, I'm out of binary-search mode, and back to normality. If I do act, by pressing "next track" or "previous track", I then skip forwards or backwards within the track by 16 minutes in either direction. The process repeats. This time, I move by 8 minutes. And so on and so on until I hit a snippet of audio I'm happy with.5) At any time I can pause or FF / REW, and I'm out of binary search mode.
This way, I can "feel" my way to the point I want to get to in the track without having to see a progress bar or have any kind of tricky audio preview. Aside from my own selfish reasons for wanting to try it, a few other thoughts occur:1) If there is only a single track in the playlist, this could be the default mode.2) If a track is above a certain length, this could be the default mode entered when the track is started. Again "normal" mode would be reset if FF / REW / PAUSE was pressed
3) There may be some general advantages for partially sighted / blind people attempting to navigate to a certain point in a long track. I'd guess reading out the position might be an option when a section has been skipped.
Any thoughts?I'm not certain if there are other combinations that are available in play mode that would mean you can binary-search at any time without a clash? (double "next track" or double "prev track"?).
If there were, general "modeless" binary search could start off with half the remaining time in the forward direction, and half the played time in the backward direction. This would seem like a very fast way to get to a specific point without arcade type reflexes :-)
Page created in 0.05 seconds with 20 queries.